“Why is she doing this, sir?” Dresdek sounded flustered for once. No wonder.
“I don’t know, yet. I’m going back to Riptide to clear up any legal problems to do with our raid on Verok’s ring. Maybe the boys will know more.” He sat forward. Dresdek had his hand over his mouth and was studying the screen. The man looked lost. “I need you to understand there was nothing you did that I blame you for. Wipe that idea from your mind. I’m getting her back. You’re helping me.”
“Okay.” Slowly Dresdek nodded. “Thank you. You need to excuse me from duties if we get close to her though. She can make me her puppet again. She did it once, easily.”
That was true, though the pain on Dresdek’s face made him wish it wasn’t so. “Agreed.”
That he had to consider she might again betray him, underlined how far his trust of Ella had fallen. He didn’t understand her actions and if he did, he doubted they’d be excusable by his standards of conduct. Maybe the two of them weren’t as in synch in their views of right and wrong as he’d thought? That was a sobering notion – that Ella might have a different idea of morality.
*****
After days of trying, Torgeir realized finding her was impossible with his resources. He appealed to some friends in Concer administration for help. In the meantime, to keep the ship running and his crew, he took up work again. At the end of that small combat, he found a Concer fleet vessel, the Traskendor, awaiting the Zeus, when she ascended to planetary orbit.
The command to attend a meeting on board the Traskendor was not one he could ignore. The purple security and red combat tags attached to the message made any of the Bak-lal related mopping-up messages look under-decorated.
The walk along the corridors of the Traskendor, Lealith-class arbitrator vessel was sobering. It could obliterate Zeus without straining its weaponry at all.
When he entered the interview room, the man awaiting him was the highest-ranking Concer officer he’d yet seen in the flesh. He had speckled gray, crew-cut hair and his face was lined by the atmospheres of a thousand battles on a thousand different planets. His uniform was weighed down by medals for valor. This was a hard, experienced soldier.
Torgeir nodded. “Sir?”
“Sit down, Lord Torgeir. This is an incognito meeting. You haven’t seen me and you don’t know my name.” His smile was brief enough to quash any hint of true happiness. “If you still want your almost-bondmate Ella to not be terminated as soon as we find her, you need to listen to me and you need to say yes at the end.”
A man didn’t panic at hearing a few words, but Torgeir came close after those. “What has she done?”
“Bad things. Concer has come to the conclusion that Ella is the most dangerous person in this universe and if you can’t help us catch her and tame her, we need to kill her. Sit.”
He found the back of the chair without looking and fumbled his way into sitting. What terrible things she had done? Would he want to save her? The love he felt for her was still in his heart but circumstances were burying it under grief and a strange dislocation between who she seemed to have been in the past and what she had become.
He’d thought he loved her but had he been loving an imaginary person?
“Go ahead, sir.”
*****
If Torgeir followed her, he never caught up.
Ella found it was easy getting through any planetary spaceport. Easy making money. Cyborgs, or those close to cyborg, were everywhere and she could coerce them into doing almost anything. She arranged for Plito’s return flight to Pelagia and journeyed onward, searching for a place to stop. Somewhere she could feel she at least belonged.
Every day, for months, she watched herself for signs of Bak-lal alterations but the removal of her foot seemed to have rendered her clean. When she figured that out, she lay back in her rented bed and laughed until her stomach hurt, then she cried into her rented pillow. It was so ironic, so tragic, and so typical of her stupid life.
The time to go back had never arrived. It had become ever more elusive, until imagining herself speaking to Torgeir again made her gut cramp. Going back simply wasn’t possible anymore. It had become a dream. She was cyborg. She had been a Bak-lal monstrosity of the worst kind. For all she knew, she’d killed hundreds of people. Why would anyone do anything except despise her, even Torgeir?
She went from planet to planet and found nothing to hold her, nothing but emptiness for her soul and heart. She’d be searching forever.
Late in life to discover something so fundamental, but now she knew – belonging meant having someone who would love her and who she could love in return.
She needed his hand in hers, his lips kissing hers, his arms around her while he told her she was his again. She’d thrown that away in one insane moment when she’d forgotten the love they’d had for each other. All her fault, not his, hers.
Maybe...he would have taken her back?
Instead of fleeing from him, she should have stood her ground and asked him if he could still love her, cyborg, Bak-lal, whatever she had become.
Then, if he’d killed her? At least she’d be done with this.
Whoever invented time should’ve made a rewind button for dumb-ass idiots like her.
Happiness was impossible without him. It had sifted through her fingers and blown away before she truly understood her loss.
Chapter 32
Two and a half months since he’d seen her. Torgeir knew the exact number of days, same as he knew how it would feel when he found her. There would be great joy, as well as the release of an anger accumulated ever since the day she’d made his own men attack him, since the day she left him.
Her disembodied floating foot...he would never forget that. That reminder of her trauma made him rein back his distaste for what she’d done. She had her reasons.
She’d left him because she thought he wouldn’t love her anymore. He’d deduced that from her note and from what Plito had told him. She hadn’t trusted him enough to even stop to ask if that was true. That was the worst of it.
He was going to find her. The only woman he’d ever loved was not escaping him. He’d find her. What he’d do to her then? He wasn’t sure.
Most days, he regurgitated these same thoughts.
“Message.” Dresdek swiveled in his seat. “From Concer. They have leads. Tracked her to a planet. We need to get there before they kill her.”
*****
There was something clean and pure about being up in the clouds, surveying the land below. With the slightly lower-than-Earth gravity on Heksepp, Ella had found reaching the peak of this Opp Mountain fairly easy. Opp was the highest tooth in a long, jaw-like and monstrous mountain range. She could breathe up here. Well, she could with the help of her mask and oxygen.
She smiled sadly at her own joke and clasped her knees. The snow under her butt was leeching in cold despite her trekking clothes, but she wanted time to just look. The guide was letting her have this moment alone. Down below, in the sparse cities, there were too many people for her, too many cyborgs. Knowing she could control people made her feel dirty sometimes.
Silence and places where there were few people were her way to...not contentment. Peace though, yes.
After months of looping, over and over, through her wish to redo the past, sorrow and disbelief had given way to a morbid acceptance of this lonely existence. Acceptance but hate too. Self-hate. She wobbled from one to the other, some days. She frowned, dreading the claws of nausea that often accompanied such thoughts.
Maybe coming up here wasn’t such a good idea.
Ella put her gloved hand to her stomach, grimacing. Hate was a horrible thing but how could she feel anything else? Her fault, all of this.
She swallowed and a few tears dribbled down her cheeks. She prayed it was only her who suffered like this. Please, let him have forgotten her.
A mild roar said a ship must be coming over, though the path to the spaceport was a
little more northern. She looked up, expecting to see a vast shadow pass overhead.
A faint scuffle in the snow behind warned the guide was returning. When the ship didn’t fly over, she gave up and stood. The edge was a few yards in front. A rock, dislodged by her movements, tumbled a few feet before stopping. She backed up. Falling off due to a collapsed shelf of snow would be stupid. She’d had so many other opportunities to die.
Sadness hit her again – unexpected and rough enough to make her eyes sting. When, or if, it came to that, she’d choose a prettier way to go. Flying into a sun? Too hot, though nicely dramatic.
Shit. Stop being maudlin.
Torgeir would’ve hugged her if he found her sad. That brought on another wave of potential weepiness. She cleared her throat. When was she going to stop remembering him?
“Are we heading back?” As she turned, she glimpsed a white figure bearing some long weapon, then several other figures in white, floating in and landing, bending at the knees. A whomm noise preceded something whacking into her neck and she crumpled at the knees, with barely time to wonder what was happening. Then, she was gone.
Thoughts ceased.
*****
Awakening, after what seemed millennia, she had a distinct sense of déjà vu. Would there be a pumpkin-orange spaceship or a chandelier nearby? Someone had knocked her out, again.
Even with her eyes shut, she could tell if any cybernetics were nearby.
Here was eerily quiet and empty of anyone or anything like that. She stretched her senses. Nothing cybernetic for miles.
Beneath her body was hard, smooth floor. Tiles. She listened and only caught distant whoops and bird calls, perhaps also the sigh of the wind. Light flickered across her eyelids and warmed her face. Sunlight.
She was dressed, from the feel of it, in panties and bra.
A heavy metal collar was around her neck. It seemed solid as hell and probably not cybernetic. Her throat moved in a furtive swallow. Shifting her arm as cautiously as she could, she reached up to touch it. Her nanogeers confirmed her suspicion – it was all metal.
“You won’t find anything you can manipulate. They’ve cleared away everything cybernetic for miles.”
The voice shocked her and her heart squeezed in. Torgeir. She’d not thought she’d ever hear him speak again. What did he mean they?
Ella opened her eyes then rolled over and pushed herself up from the floor.
Every apologetic word in the ’verse struggled to leave her tongue and she said none of them.
He sat, side on to her, outlined by brightness, in the right-hand corner of a long space where a wall should be. His features were blasted away by the daylight and she was pining to see him, every part of him, to kiss him from his toes to his lips, and she mustn’t, she had no right anymore.
She’d forced herself past grieving for him, after months of doing so daily, and now he was here. Could she hope? In spite of how she’d been brought here?
Being rendered unconscious and collared were not a good omens.
Hoping was premature.
“Why am I here?”
This room seemed suspended far above the landscape of whatever planet this was. There were green forests or fields down there, miles away and blurred by distance. This was not Heksepp, she was sure.
“That collar,” he said dryly. “Is packed with some new tracker they’ve devised just for you. Don’t ask me how it works but Concer’s scientist are happy with it. Try to remove it and they’ll likely kill you.”
Why would Concer be concerned about her? Ella fingered the collar again. Her actions might have been somewhat criminal...okay, she’d controlled people but who knew that? Not them, surely. No one ever noticed. She’d been crafty as an invisible fox.
“Do you realize how many people you have angered, how many you have scared? Even Mimi seems sad. You ran away after making my men turn against me. They don’t understand and Dresdek, at the least, feels betrayed. The entire Concer administration wants you dead.”
Stunned, she put her hand to her throat and encountered that collar again. “Why?”
There was more to this than she’d imagined.
His monotone delivery had scared her more than anything. Which told her so much that she already knew. Torgeir meant more to her than anything or anyone else.
“Because you’re dangerous.” He twisted and looked toward her, though she couldn’t see his eyes. “You can do things that everyone is terrified of. They’ve calculated that forty-three percent of the population has enough cybernetics to be controllable by this power you have. They signed your execution warrant within a day of working that out.”
“Oh.” She put her palms to the floor. Her brain whirled with deductions. She hadn’t considered the implications. She’d put him into a bad situation by her actions. “I wouldn’t though, do anything terrible... Why am I alive? Why are you here? Whoever did this.” She waved her hand about. “Put me here. They’ve not threatened you?”
“Why do you think you’re alive?”
She sucked in her lip. A headache was looming. He was here but he hadn’t come to her. That said he wanted to help but he didn’t want to touch her. Horrible but understandable.
That he was here and Concer knew it, had let him come...
“You.” It meant he had some say in her outcome. That was good, for him. He wasn’t just a prisoner. At last her sorrow let her say what she wanted to, needed desperately to say. “I’m sorry.”
His inhalation and sigh was painful to hear. “Are you, Ella?”
He’d said her name and she hoped that was a sign.
“Yes.” She raised up on her knees, about to go to him.
“Stay there. I’m not done talking. Not at all.”
Ominous, and in that grinding, hard voice. She sank onto her heels, the ache in her chest enough to take her breath away. This was an interrogation not a lover coming back to her, but what did she expect? She’d wronged him.
She gulped and said, “I’m sorry” again in a small voice. He ignored her.
“Why did you run from me? We were almost fully bondmated.”
Why had she? Ahhh, all those reasons. They’d made sense at the time. She leaned down, so distraught she slowly collapsed and ended up with her forehead resting on her fists where she’d planted them on the floor. She rocked her head on her fists. She spoke into the dull space made by her fists and her body.
“I knew you’d hate me. I was Bak-lal. You said you’d pay to kill Bak-lal.”
“I may have said that, but you never gave me the opportunity to answer you.”
“I know.” A sob broke from her throat.
“Did you not trust me? The truth.”
The truth? Fuck. “No. I guess I didn’t, but –”
“Stop.”
Silence fell awhile and all she could hear was her breathing. Crying was pitiful. She sat up and waited for him to speak.
“I get it. I do. I understand in a way but it’s still inexcusable that you didn’t trust me. You used me as much as you did Dresdek. I would have understood. I’m not an ogre or a fool. The doctor’s report said you had one lesion that was removable. Your genetic structure otherwise was fine.”
“Oh.” She sniffed.
“Not saying sorry again?”
“I think I need to let you decide what you think.”
“What do you want, Ella? You ran and made no attempt to come back to me. I need you still, but I don’t know if I want you.”
His words pierced her like a spear. She only had the truth and she left her fumbling hands in her lap while she tried to say the right words.
“I need you still, Torgeir, and I want you. Is there a difference between the two? I’m too confused to tell.” A sob leaked out. “I never stopped loving you but I was...I am afraid.”
“Of?”
“You...” Damn, this sounded stupid. “Of you rejecting me. I was terrified you’d want to
kill me or hate me for once being Bak-lal. Maybe for being Bak-lal now too.” She ran on, spilling all her fears. She’d rather have them out and ugly than stewing in the dark, eating away at her. “You haven’t seen what I was when they had me.” She gulped, nauseous and shivering, with tears flooding from her eyes. “I was this spider-like thing. Not human. Not anything like a human. I couldn’t conceive of anyone liking me.”
The brightness around his silhouette didn’t let her see his expression.
“I hurt you though. I knew it would hurt you, but I figured you were best without me.”
“Ella.” He was shaking his head, she thought. “They’ve given me the power of life and death over you. As if I could ever kill you. Can I ever trust you to trust me again?”
“Please, can I touch you?” The plea in her voice was obvious but she didn’t care.
He patted his lap. “Come here.”
She crawled to him and laid her head on his lap, not daring to ask for more. After a long drawn-out silence, he put his hand on her head.
“I trust you,” she whispered.
“Hmmm.” His fingers stirred her hair a little.
I do, I do, I do. She said those in her head and her heart because she was sure they wouldn’t help if said out loud. Maybe nothing would.
“You know how they tracked you? Through the slave code. You removed the code on your cybernetic parts but neglected the genetic component.”
They would be Concer, the big daddy administration of the known ’verse.
She’d known that was a flaw. Seemed it was lucky she’d not been able to erase all the code. Just being able to be with him awhile was enough to soothe her...to demolish her and to soothe her, to send a desperate longing through her such that she’d fall apart completely if, after this, he left her alone again. But it was worth it. So worth it.
She knew now, she needed to at least try.
Chapter 33
Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe Page 22