She turned back to Six who was still staring at her in puzzlement.
“Commander,” he said. “I do not understand.”
“You don’t have to,” K said in a harsh whisper. “It’s done now. It’s all…over.”
Then the world spun around her and she crumpled to the ground.
Chapter Twenty-five
“There! There it is—didn’t I tell you there was a ship coming out of Midas?” Loki stabbed a finger at the viewscreen where a tiny, shiny black dot was rising off the rocky, barren little world. “It’s a Purist ship—an older model too.”
“Like the one that was stolen from the royal docks?” Rolf stared at it with interest.
“She stole a ship from the royal docks?” Boone looked at Loki’s new touch partner in surprise. They had known that K had gotten off planet somehow—the Empress had declared that she no longer felt the presence of her daughter anywhere on Eros—but nothing had been said about a ship being missing.
“Well, she is a princess with a claim to the whole planet so technically she didn’t steal anything,” Loki pointed out. “But yes, my man Rolf here was in touch with Eros this morning and he found out through the grapevine that the ship was just reported missing today.”
“I’m a mechanic,” Rolf explained. “Like to keep my ear to the ground about anything to do with ships. Apparently the master of ships knew the Purist vessel was missing but he was afraid to report it.”
“He should have spoken up right away,” Loki said primly. “Now the princess is almost a standard week ahead of any pursuit the Empress can put out. Mr. Master of the ships will be lucky to keep his head.”
“That princess is K,” Boone reminded his pilot in a surly tone. “You know—the woman I love? The one who might be flying by right under our noses right now while you and Rolf debate the fate of some minor official back on Eros?”
“Well what do you want me to do?” Loki demanded. “I’m not a mind reader—I can’t tell if it’s her aboard.”
“Scan the vessel,” Boone said. “Read for life signatures.”
Grumbling, Loki did as he was told. As the instrument panel lit up, he read the results moodily. “Just one life signature aboard,” he reported. “But it might just be a lone Paladin doing some kind of drill.”
“Hail the ship,” Boone directed.
“What? We’re still damn close to Midas, Boone! If it turns out not to be K, we might as well be putting a big ‘Please attack us now’ sign on the side of the ship.”
“Do it,” Boone growled. “Damn it, Loki, just hail it. Now.”
With poor grace, Loki did as commanded. There was a long moment of silence and then a familiar face popped onto the viewscreen.
“Shayla?” Boone stared at her in disbelief.
“Boone?” She started crying. “Boone, is that really you?”
“The one and only. Goddess, it’s good to see your face!”
“Yours too! Oh Boone, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“You’ll be seeing a lot more of the big lug in a minute,” Loki said. “Stand by to be boarded.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Shayla whispered, her eyes shining. “Come as quick as you can.”
“We will,” Boone promised. He looked at her uncertainly, hoping against hope that Loki’s life signature scan had been wrong. “Shayla, is there anyone else with you onboard?”
“No.” Shayla shook her tear streaked face. “No, Boone. I’m all alone.”
Boone felt his heart sink but he had no time to grieve. Loki was already setting an intercept course with the stolen Purist ship. Almost before he could think they were locking an airlock onto the other ship’s entryway and his little sister was running into his arms.
There was, of course, a lot of kissing and hugging and a lot more tears on both sides but though Boone was happy to have his sister back, he couldn’t stop himself from asking about K. What Shayla told him chilled his heart.
“So she made you leave her there?” he asked for the tenth time. “Just leave her there and go?”
“I’m sorry, Boone—I told her you wouldn’t want me to.” Shayla looked ready to cry again. “But she pushed me into the ship and said…she said…”
Boone frowned. “What exactly did she say, Shayla?”
“She said she was done for.” Shayla shook her head. “I don’t know what she meant by that except that she also said she was in…in pain.” She bit her lip, looking up at Boone. “I’m sorry, Boone, I should never have left her, no matter what she told me.”
“No, it’s all right. K knew what she was doing.” He tried to make his voice gentle and his heart swelled with love and joy to see his little sister again. But it was a bittersweet reunion. The thought that K was stuck back on Midas somewhere, a captive or dying or both made him crazy inside.
“Boone—”
“I can’t stand this.” He stood up and started pacing. “She’s hurting—maybe dying. And she’s stuck on Midas, where—”
“Where we can never get to her,” Loki finished for him. He shook his head. “Forget it, Boone, you know there’s no way.”
“I have to get to her.” Boone ran a hand through his hair. “I have to.”
“And what can you do for her if you do?” Loki demanded. “I know you’ve been tinkering away in your lab but do you have anything that can help her through her cycle yet? Any way she can take off that damn ugly suit without going into full feral sex mode?”
“Not yet,” Boone admitted heavily. “I mean, I have something I think could work but I haven’t had time to test it yet.”
“Well, even if you did have a perfected formula, there’s no way we can get her off Midas by ourselves,” Loki pointed out. “Anymore than we could just waltz in and get Shayla. K is probably under a very heavy guard.”
“You don’t understand—I have to try.” Boone shook his head. “She’s been contaminated, Loki—they’ll kill her for it. Purge her. I have to get to her.” He started for the airlock but Mom, who had been standing silently in the corner, put a hand on his arm.
“Where are you going, Boone?”
“To get K. I’ll take the Purist ship and go back by myself,” he said fiercely.
“That’s suicide and you know it,” she said quietly.
He shook off her arm. “At least K won’t die alone.”
“Boone, no!” Shayla was crying again. “Please, I thought I’d never see you again and now I’m losing you five minutes after I found you.”
“Actually, I found you,” Boone reminded her gently.
She shook her head. “Whatever. You can’t go down there alone—you don’t know what it’s like. Mom’s right—it’s suicide.”
“Shayla, please try to understand.” He took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I love K and you don’t abandon people you love. I can’t leave her down there alone anymore than I could leave you. So I have to go.”
Shayla began sobbing harder. “Boone, please…please…” But she couldn’t get out any more. Boone hugged her hard once and then started to leave.
“Whoa—hang on now. There’s no need for such desperate heroics,” Rolf said soothingly. He had been standing beside Loki, with his arm wrapped around the smaller man’s waist. Now he came forward and put a hand on Boone’s shoulder. “Maybe I can help.”
“How?” Boone demanded. “What can you possibly do in this situation?”
Rolf shrugged. “Not much myself, I admit. But like I told you before, I know some people.”
Chapter Twenty-six
When K woke up she saw a familiar pair of black-on-black eyes staring into her own. Black with not even the thinnest sliver of white around their outer margins.
“High Sentinel!” She sat up on the thin metal cot with a gasp.
“Good evening, K. I understand you’ve been using my name in vain.” He raised one thin eyebrow at her and scooted the plain metal chair he was sitting on closer to her cot. They were the only two pieces o
f furniture in the small, bare, windowless room. Was she in a cell? Was she a prisoner?
“I—”
“Telling the guard you were moving a prisoner under my orders and then setting her free instead? That’s treason, K. High treason. Not to mention a total divergence from Purity.”
“I’m aware of that.” K lifted her chin, meeting that black-on-black gaze and trying not to show fear. “What’s more, I’ve been contaminated. Contaminated beyond reprieve.”
“Decided to try a bit of sexual reproduction, did you?” he asked blandly.
K’s cheeks got hot but she refused to drop her eyes. “Yes,” she said shortly.
To her surprise, the High Sentinel only sighed.
“I surmised as much,” he said calmly. “I can tell by the color of your eyes that your original biology must have reasserted itself. The Erian sexual cycle is…distressingly strong.”
K couldn’t hide her surprise. “But if you guessed I was contaminated, why didn’t you purge me?”
“Oh, you’re far too valuable to purge, K. I have plans for you—I always have, ever since I plucked you from your sleeping platform at the tender age of five cycles and stole you away from that filthy, Impure planet.”
K felt an icy shiver run down her spine.
“It was you? You personally kidnapped me?”
He nodded. “I did. For you are the key, K. The key to a bloodless and immediate takeover of all of Eros.”
She shook her head. “I know about my lineage but that’s not true. I’m an outsider there now. An enemy. Do you really think they’d all just lay down their arms and allow you to take over just because I said so?”
“That’s exactly what they’re going to do.” One corner of his thin-lipped mouth twitched upwards. If he had been anyone else—someone with emotions—K might almost have thought he was filled with unholy glee.
“But—”
“You see,” the High Sentinel continued. “The Empress of Eros has a connection to her people—all of her people—through her blood. By virtue of her lineage and a psy blood-bond, she is able to control them completely. So much so that if she tells them to lay down their arms and surrender to the conquering overlords who have come to claim their planet, they must and will obey.”
K’s mouth was suddenly bone dry. She remembered all the different references she’d heard to blood while she was on Eros. The exulted blood, the ruling blood—she’d heard those phrases several times but had never really understood what they meant. No wonder the Empress had been so pleased to have her back in the fold…no wonder the High Sentinel had kidnapped her in the first place.
A new thought occurred to her.
“But I’m not the Empress at all. My mother…” The word stuck in her throat—the Empress was still strange to her, almost as strange as the concept of having a mother in the first place. Still, K forced herself to go on. “My mother…she still lives.”
“That will be the first thing we take care of,” the High Sentinel assured her with chilling calm. “The moment we gain orbit around Eros, we will have the current Empress purged. I already have people in place around her—the assassination should be exceedingly simple. Then, with the entire planet in chaos, we can swoop in with you in the lead. You will order the inhabitants to lay down their arms and surrender to our regime. A perfect, bloodless coup.” This time K was certain she saw the corner of his mouth curl upward. “And then, after we have the resources of Eros at our disposal, Colossus will be next.”
“No!” K said at once, the words jumping out of her mouth before she even had time to think about them. “No, I won’t help you do that. Won’t help you overrun any other worlds.”
The High Sentinel’s black-on-black eyes narrowed. “I see. Now that you have experienced the emotions of the Impure, you feel an affinity for your home planet. You recoil in horror at the assassination of your ‘mother.’ Is that it?”
“No,” K said, trying to keep her voice calm and steady. “I visited Eros—did you know that?”
“Indeed,” he said calmly. “We ran some memory scans on you while you were unconscious. They were most…illuminating.” His lip curled upward—a look that would have been disgust if anyone else had made it.
K felt cold. They’d been scanning her while she was out? How much had they seen? Did they know about Boone? She struggled to keep her voice calm and her face impassive.
“If you scanned my memories, you know the Erians tried to take me prisoner. The Empress thought she could take over my life and use me as a pawn—just as you are proposing to do.”
A slight frown creased his face. “If your stay there was so unpleasant, why are you refusing to help in their subjugation and purification?”
“I learned while I was gone,” K said. “Learned that there are different ways of life than ours. Different but no less valid or precious to the people who live them.”
“Those ‘other people’ must be brought to Purity,” the High Sentinel said sternly. “Brought to Purity and purged of their filthy, Impure sexual and emotional practices. They—”
“I don’t believe you really care about the way they reproduce or that they dare to touch and…and love each other at all,” K interrupted him. “Or not nearly as much as you’d have everyone think. You want to take over Eros for its resources—both natural and genetic. You need new material for cloning and you’ve turned your home planet into an industrial wasteland. Now you want to do the same to every other planet in the solar system. Well, I won’t help you do it.” She lifted her chin. “You can purge me if you want to—I refuse.”
“I told you, we won’t be purging you, K. Although we will be purging that giant who captured you and filled your mind with Impure thoughts in the first place.” The High Sentinel arched an eyebrow at her. “Boone? Wasn’t that his name?”
K’s heart started pounding and she forgot her promise to herself to remain impassive.
“Not Boone. You leave him alone!”
“Oh, I won’t hurt him.” The corner of the High Sentinel’s mouth twitched again. “It’s you who will purge him, my dear K. You who will pull the trigger when the time comes.”
“I’ll never—”
“Oh, yes you will.” The High Sentinel leaned forward, staring at her. “As soon as your new skinsuit has purged you of the Impure emotions you so unfortunately acquired on your brief sojourn abroad, you will once again see things my way. Through the clear, calm gaze of reason and Purity.”
“New skinsuit?” K looked down at herself in shock. For the first time it occurred to her that she wasn’t in horrible pain anymore. Could the new mat-black suit covering her body from head to toe have something to do with that?
“Normally a Paladin has only one suit from birth until death,” the High Sentinel said. “In your case, however, the suit you had was too wounded to contain and control your surging hormones. This new suit will be able to do that and more. It will take some time to completely acclimate to your body but once it does, your eyes will once again become the black of Purity and all these distasteful ‘emotions’ you’ve been experiencing will be purged.”
K felt sick. How many times in her stay with Boone had she wished to have her suit back? How often had she cursed the uncomfortable and irritating emotions she was forced to endure without it? And yet now…she couldn’t imagine going back to her cold, robotic self. Couldn’t imagine never feeling again—especially when she thought of Boone.
“What if I don’t…don’t want to stop feeling?” she whispered, barely able to get the words out.
The High Sentinel shook his head. “You speak as if you had a choice in the matter, K. You don’t. I’ll come see you in a couple of days when the suit has had time to work on you. I’m sure you’ll be more amenable to my plans then.”
“Never.” K rose on trembling legs and looked down at him. “I don’t care what you do to me. I’ll never hurt Boone.”
The High Sentinel stared at her coldly.
“You wi
ll, K. When the time comes you will remember who you really are—an agent of Purity. A Paladin who fears nothing and feels nothing. And then you will act.”
With that he stood and went to the blank metal door at the far wall of the small room. He rapped twice and the door opened, allowing him to leave. K opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She had nothing more to say.
The High Sentinel didn’t even look back as he walked out, leaving K to her fate.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The suit began to work on her—though perhaps not as quickly as the High Sentinel had believed it would. It controlled her hormone surges and kept the horrible, stabbing pain at bay, for which K was grateful.
But it took away more than her pain.
Slowly, her eyes turned black again and with each stab of the suit’s needles digging into her forearms, a little more of her emotion was leached away. A week after waking up with the new skinsuit on, the feelings she’d had were barely more than ghosts.
Unquiet ghosts.
At night, when the suit gave her depressants to make her sleep, she had dreams of Boone. Hazy, indistinct visions filled with all the lost feelings the suit had driven away. Little moments of their life together playing over and over, memories she hadn’t even realized she’d been gathering.
As she slept, K remembered the way he’d held her after her first shower, the way he’d kissed away her tears and comforted her. She also remembered the way he’d helped her quell the heat rising within her when her cycle first started. The taste of his lips…the feel of his big hands all over her body…they way he’d licked and tasted her until she lost control… All these scenes played through her mind as she lay on the bare metal cot, asleep but still missing him.
The dreams were bitter-sweet. Often she woke up with her cheeks wet and flushed and a tight feeling in her chest that even the skinsuit couldn’t dispel. She tried to push the strange feelings away—they hurt and there was no point in suffering such pain. Boone was gone and even if he wasn’t, there was no way they could be together.
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