“You really do want that house in the burbs, huh?” Davin tilted his tumbler back for a long sip.
She leaned closer and slid her hand halfway up his thigh without drawing attention, as if she didn’t notice herself doing it. “Maybe. Eventually. Who knows? But you can’t deny it’d be badass to run a recycler biz together.”
“Together?” Davin repeated, setting his drink down.
“Sure,” Jade said, hand sliding up and down his leg. “We’ve got the know-how between us. You could buy, I could sell.”
“Yeah, but you’re missing a somewhat important little item called money.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “Masher machines alone cost a shit ton.”
Jade smirked, not like a vulture this time. More like a grown-up at a naive little boy. Scheming. She was definitely scheming. And Davin had walked right into it, whatever it was. She kicked back the rest of her old fashioned and gulped it down.
“Come on,” she said and pushed off her barstool. “Let’s continue this at my place.”
Davin stayed anchored to his seat, panic rising in his stomach, quickening his heartbeat. “Tell me what’s going on. What are you up to?”
Jade’s smile grew. She moved closer to him and unzipped her leather vest down to the bottom of her breasts, showing curvy cleavage—big enough to press together but not so big she fell out. “Guess you’ll have to come with me to see what I’m hiding.” She winked, then flipped around and headed for the exit.
Davin clenched his teeth. “You’re exploiting my weakness!” he called after her. It genuinely angered him—almost as much as it aroused him.
Jade halted and cast her eyes over her shoulder, mischievous face framed by inky black hair. “Oh, you’re not weak, are you?” She allowed her fingers to hook daintily onto the split in her vest before walking out.
“Dammit,” Davin muttered. He downed the rest of his drink and went after her.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Davin felt his body ramping up as they closed in on their destination. Jade moved like a fox, legs long and toned from years of treading through the streets of Flotsam.
Her apartment building was a squat, sooty-gray concrete block with mostly intact windows, about as devoid of charm and life as a structure could be. Davin vaguely remembered it from previous visits, but prior to those nights he’d consumed somewhere between four and nine more drinks than this time. Even being his first sober trip, he didn’t think he could find his way back. All the buildings looked the same: four-story bricks with equally spaced windows acting as glass portals into the drab lives of their residents. All but the occasional overachieving five-story gray brick. It was an old industry district, where people burrowed into the carcasses of former factories.
The streets extended only a little wider than the average alleyway and were often choked by dumpsters or chained-up electrobikes. The smell of week-old trash hung in the air, and a low buzz emitted from trash bags leaning against a brick barrier. It almost killed the mood. Microfly bots munched lazily on the garbage inside, turning it into carbon dioxide or storing it for recycling. Old models, clearly. The microflies in Apex could gobble up a trash bag and be on their way to a repository in a couple hours. Modern technology.
Jade abruptly stopped. A pair of mopeds whizzed by, each carrying a thuggish mountain of muscle. The men looked silly on the tiny motorbikes, but their permanent scowls prevented Davin from snickering. Not enough room to jump out of the way if they wanted to run him over.
Davin followed Jade as she navigated up her grungy stairwell, littered with broken mopeds chained to the iron railing. He let out a sigh of relief once they stepped into Jade’s top-floor apartment. Despite the warehousey look, the place seemed like a four-star resort compared to the rest of Flotsam. Steel beams rose through a slick, concrete floor and into the high ceiling. The windows were reinforced, the door studded with deadbolts—a necessary precaution in this neighborhood.
But the spacious, open-air living room had fine furniture with plush pillows. Jade tapped a few buttons on a control pad embedded in the concrete, and a series of black panels on the walls lit up into a bright panorama of colorful hot air balloons over rolling green hills. Smooth, gently thudding music piped down from unseen speakers.
Davin crouched by the shaggy rug and ran his fingers through it. Pleasant memories came to mind. “I remember this spot.”
Jade headed for the kitchen, separated from the living room by a granite countertop and barstools. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.” She returned with a pair of longneck beers—pale IPAs, bitter, hoppy, and strong. The worst.
Davin sat on the couch and took a swig, commanding his face not to scrunch. He wouldn’t let Jade outman him with the drinks. If she outmanned him there, she might get ideas of other ways she could dominate him. Davin wouldn’t let that happen. He had to change the subject before it went to the beer.
“Tell me,” he said, returning to their conversation at the bar. “What do you want from me?”
She lifted an eyebrow and crossed her legs, swirling the bottle in her fingers. “What do you mean? I want you.”
Davin set his beer on the glossy coffee table. “Jade. I’m not an idiot. Tell me what’s going on.”
Jade sighed. Her shoulders loosened as she reassessed the situation. “Look, I know about Sierra Falco.”
Dumbbells dropped somewhere in Davin’s chest. He felt like curtains had whisked open around him, like he had been unmasked. Silence swelled between them as Davin gaped.
“How?” he pushed out.
She smirked and took another sip. “We run in the same circles, Dav. Heard you found something valuable in a space yacht. Then I see on the news the prima filia’s personal ship blown to bits out near Owl, right where you happened to be. Put two and two together.”
Davin’s hand squeezed reflexively into a fist as he realized the culprit. “Jimmy.”
“You can’t blame him,” Jade said, brushing a ripple of black hair away from her eyes. “He was excited. You bring in good product.”
“Does he always blab about my haul?”
She shrugged. “When you tell him you’ve got something big, it usually means you do.”
Davin shook his head, mad at himself for giving away as much as he had. Should’ve been more discreet. “Does Jimmy know I’ve got Sierra?”
“If he does, he hasn’t told me.” Jade tilted back her beer for a long swig, then set the bottle on the coffee table by Davin’s. “But whether he does or not, he’s gonna get you a meaty check for that girl, sooner or later. And when he does—”
“You want in on it,” Davin said, connecting the dots. It all seemed obvious now. Painfully obvious. Embarrassingly obvious.
Jade leaned closer, letting the split in her vest display the smooth skin of her cleavage. But her eyes were fixated on his. It confused him—did she want attention on her eyes or her breasts? Davin didn’t want to care about either, but, of course, he did. Even with the feeling of betrayal building in his gut. Even with that sense that he was being used.
“Davin,” she said, snapping him away from his degenerating thoughts. “I don’t just want your money. I want you. I wanna be partners. Me and you. We could help each other.”
“Partners?” Davin got hung up on that word.
“Yes. Don’t you wanna stop jumping around through space from junk heap to junk heap? Don’t you want a normal life?”
“A normal life . . . with you?” The words escaped him. He tried to hold them in but couldn’t. A whirl of emotions pushed and pulled in his chest like a two-man saw.
Jade smiled. “Of course with me. Every day. I couldn’t do it without you.”
“Together?” The word carried a weight, a meaning, that Jade couldn’t ignore. The long lack of response confirmed it. But Davin needed to know. He waited, frozen in dread, feeling things he’d never felt before. Not for Jade, at least. There’d never been the possibility. The chance had never come to consider her as some
thing more than a passing ship in the night. Until now.
Jade’s smile faded into open lips, on the verge of words that didn’t seem to come. She took a deep breath, and it stayed in her chest. “Dav . . .” She tilted her head with a forced smile. “You know what we are. I don’t even think I’d be capable . . . I mean, you don’t want me.”
“Don’t I?” Numbness spread through his chest, his veins, his limbs. Maybe he hadn’t thought this about her before, but in that moment, it felt as if he had.
Jade picked up Davin’s beer and brought it to his hand. “Drink,” she commanded, and he obeyed. “Keep drinking. I know you don’t like it. Finish it anyway.”
Davin let out a sigh and worked on the beer. Bitter. Hoppy. Skunky. Everything he hated in a drink. Jade wriggled closer, like a snake. Her hand massaged his thigh and her nose explored his neck under the ear.
“Finish it,” she whispered before kissing him on the jugular, then the earlobe. “It’s not what you want, but it’s what you need.”
He knew what she was doing. He knew her schemes. He knew she was tying him into a knot around her finger. He knew he was being manipulated. Used.
Oh, yes. He knew.
But he finished the damn beer anyway, then grasped the sides of her head and pulled her into a kiss. A long, hard kiss. Angry and passionate. She responded, moving closer and massaging between his legs. Their kiss evolved into more—lips locking and sliding apart, tongues pressing together, breaths growing heavier. Jade pressed in and straddled him. Her fingers found their way to the zipper on her vest and drew it down, down, down.
The hollowness lingered somewhere in the back of his mind.
But as Jade’s vest dropped to the shaggy rug, Davin resolved that it could wait.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It took about an hour for the hollowness to come back. Twenty minutes of that on the couch, another ten on the rug, maybe fifteen in the kitchen, the rest on the silky sheets of Jade’s bed.
Davin stared at the concrete slab suspended above him, wondering off and on about the structural integrity of the trestlework holding it in place, imagining what the experience would be like if it fell straight on him. Jade probably wouldn’t even wake up. She would die in blissful slumber as two massive chunks of cement crushed their bones and smashed them into one fleshy substance, like jelly between slices of bread.
At some point, he became aware of his own awakeness and slid out of the bed. Jade’s breathing stirred, and she mumbled something, then sighed and settled back into sleep. The cool night air drifted in from the cracked window as Davin rifled through dim lumps of clothing on the floor and slipped into his pants.
Back in the main room, the wallscreens still showed a looping panorama of hot air balloons drifting up and down. Davin found the remote control and started pressing buttons, too tired to read the array of tiny lettering across the front pad. One of the screens switched to a news channel. In the bottom corner, a rotating, tilted, three-dimensional spiral galaxy symbol bore the letters “SGN,” which stood for “Spartan Galactic News.” One of the top VN news conglomerates. A banner across the bottom read in bold, capitalized text: “CARINIAN MINISTER OF ARMS SPEAKS OUT.”
The slick-haired fellow on the screen didn’t seem to warrant such an urgent headline. He stood on a stage behind a glass lectern with the holographic letters “EFO” in its body. The camera view showed only him but gave the impression he addressed a large audience. His eyes swept wide and far, bearing a sparkle as deep as the galaxy itself.
“That’s why . . .” the Carinian minister said from hidden speakers, “the work done at Earth Forever is so important.”
In the professionally timed pause between statements, Davin had time to realize what “EFO” stood for. It was the Earth Forever Organization. They’d garnered lots of news over the years, their spokesmen always saying something outrageous about why Earth belonged to such and such or so and so. Davin never paid much attention to Carinian politics, but he knew enough to know Earth Forever generated more heat than a Hornet engine.
“See, it’s people like you all . . .” The suave Carinian stepped to the side of the lectern and aimed his finger at the audience. “Who will someday, hopefully soon, set things right in the galaxy.” He took a few more steps away from the lectern, and the camera followed him. “The smart people of Earth Forever realize that Carina has deeper ties to Earth . . . than any other nation or group could possibly imagine. It means more to us. It holds a special significance . . . to us.”
He kept pausing for dramatic effect. It got on Davin’s nerves, but apparently the audience approved.
“Earth isn’t a prize,” the Carinian said. “It isn’t a conquest. And neither is it Carina’s little brother.” The audience laughed, and the speaker waited for them to settle. Once they did, he cupped his hands in front of his body. “Earth is the cradle of all we hold dear in this universe. It is the deepest root of life’s great tree. And it’s the homeland of the venerated prophets of old, who delivered to us immeasurable wisdom through their words and their pens. Earth isn’t just any planet. No. It’s the Sacred Planet.”
The guy spoke with such passion and persuasion that it lulled Davin into a trance. He almost forgot to think about the words themselves. If Earth was Carina’s “sacred planet,” to whom did it belong? The Earthers or Carina? Davin gathered that the religious fanatics in Carina would claim it belonged to them, and that they weren’t going to be shy about saying so. They had Moses or Jehovah or Zeus or somebody to please, so they had to say crazy stuff. This guy was just particularly good at it.
Then Davin remembered the headline. Maybe it didn’t exaggerate after all. If anything, it probably underplayed all that was going on in the speech.
But a thousand lightyears separated Davin from the crazies, so he pressed the power button to switch off all the screens, contemplated the sudden, terrible darkness of the room, then stretched out on the couch. Sleep came quickly.
The Executive
Chapter Thirty
Orion Arm, on the planet Agora . . .
Emma studied the Axwell megastructure out the window of her private shuttle as they approached from above. A titan of chrome, glass, and white stone, the Axwell Building towered seventy stories atop a platform over the ocean. Sleek, white boats docked in its halo of bays or plowed through the indigo waters toward Apex, the centermost of the Commerce Islands. Sweeping kelp farms of orange and emerald green surrounded a smaller isle in the distance.
As the automated shuttle shifted course toward the landing pads on the far side of the cylindrical mammoth, Emma took in a panorama of the soccer field-sized rooftop. A giant fountain in the center shot a stream of white water high into the air, and two smaller fountains flanked it on either side. The strip of green surrounding them showcased a colorful rose garden and a handful of evenly spaced trees. At the front of the rooftop, on a tier one floor down, a dozen or more Spanish-style villas lined the curving stone terrace, each set on tiny plots of land that only a multimillionaire could afford. Stone spires at the edges of the rooftop came to a point high above the villas, and communication rods reached even farther.
On a tier above the fountains, a handful of white, palatial mansions buttressed by Corinthian columns gleamed in the sunlight, owned by the richest and most powerful people on the planet—the one percent of Agora’s one percent. It struck Emma as the sort of opulence she would expect to see on Mount Olympus, each home impressive enough to rival the Pantheon. After all, the residents of these estates were practically gods among men.
The house in the center, directly in front of the great fountain, belonged to Georgio Heimer, president of Cornerstone Jurisdiction. That was Emma’s destination. It might’ve been her imagination, but Heimer’s mansion looked a tad bigger than its neighbors.
* * *
Emma fidgeted with the buttons of her suit vest as she was led through breathtaking halls and chambers, everything polished and tidy. Even the butler, a prim
and placid old man, wore a perfectly crisp suit and had perfectly manicured, medically grown hair. It had to be medically grown. Men in their sixties didn’t naturally have hair like his, full and untainted by gray.
Emma noticed a myriad of details, parts of the house that didn’t exist in any other. Chandeliers of hanging crystalline gems, gilded trimming, cloudy white marble countertops on every table and counter, screens in the walls showing a map of the rooms. Emma thought her 2,800-square-foot condo on Apex was more than she needed, despite what everyone who knew her said. They all thought she should be living in something that matched her income level. A bigger box.
So many people seemed to be caught up in the pursuit of residing in a bigger, nicer box. So many that Emma sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with her for not wanting the same.
Heimer’s mansion reminded her of why she liked her modest condo. This place was huge, cavernous, and most of it useless. It instilled in her nothing but a desire to get out, to go back someplace where efficiency held higher value than pointless luxury.
The butler gave a small, professional smile as he opened the door to the library. Emma waited until she got inside to swallow, afraid she might alert the man to her secret lack of confidence. Inside, between the tall, dark wood shelves packed with books, a circle of high-backed chairs sent a jolt of surprise down her spine. Her nervousness shifted into something else entirely. A handful of familiar faces turned toward her as she approached the circle.
Georgio Heimer stood and smiled, the lifted skin of his face showing no wrinkles despite his age. He was the only man of the group not wearing business clothes, instead donning loose, white pants and a silken button-down. A man of his status had no one to impress.
“Miss Scarlet, please join us,” he said with practiced cheerfulness. “Good to see you again.”
“You too, Georgio.” Her eyes swept across the faces of familiar, powerful men.
Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series Page 16