by Natalie Grey
What was she trying to do? Was she trying to impress Mala?
Yes. Yes, she was, and it was very wrong of her. She cleared her throat.
“But you must know about the Dragons,” she offered. “You work in Intelligence.”
Just where in Intelligence, she wasn’t sure. Even with Tersi’s help, that information had proved impossible to track—and Nyx, having said that she had “an old friend she wanted to look up,” hadn’t been ready to confide the whole story and ask Tersi to dig deeper. Whatever division Mala was in, they must keep some of their payroll records classified.
Mala, unaware of the hours Nyx had spent looking through records, just smile and nodded. “Yep. But I’m in Money Laundering, not any of the…action-y parts.” She gave a smile that flipped Nyx’s stomach upside down.
“Really?” Nyx managed. She was sure she’d checked Money Laundering. Then again, with what Mala was doing to her head, she couldn’t be sure of much of anything right now. She tried to come up with something even vaguely intelligent to say. “You’d be surprised how often we track people down from a money trail. Well, actually, maybe you wouldn’t be.”
“No, I am.” Mala considered. “I….”
“What?”
“I don’t know, money laundering is kind of dull, isn’t it? Spreadsheets and so on. I guess I always figured you were the people who kicked doors down and yelled ‘Don’t move! Dragons!’”
“I have never once done that.”
Mala laughed into her drink. “I will not trust the TV shows, then.”
“Please don’t.” Nyx took an over-large gulp of her whiskey. “So. Money laundering.”
“Not all that interesting.”
“No, it is. Tell me about it.” Tell me about you. About your life. I can’t believe it’s been so long. Nyx shut her mouth on the words.
“It’s really not very interesting.” Mala shook her head, hunching her shoulders under the jacket, and then sat back as the waiter placed a plate of food in front of her. “I mostly work with terrorist organizations. Well, not with them, obviously. Some of my colleagues spend their time trying to figure out where the money’s coming from, and I…well, I started with trying to develop algorithms that alerted us to money laundering across banking institutions, but once I got that down, I’ve been working on what they do with the money when they get hold of it again.”
“Wait, what do you mean, ‘once you got that down?’”
“Well, I wrote the algorithms.” Mala took a bite of food and covered her mouth as she chewed.
“You’re the one who wrote Orion’s Algorithm? I thought that was written by…”
Something flashed in Mala’s eyes and was gone a moment later. “I … collaborated on it.”
“That’s impressive.” Nyx raised her eyebrows. “Seriously. Very elegant. We use it, too.”
“I see.” Mala’s smile was tight; she shrugged. “Anyway, yeah. I’ve also been doing some work with market distortions.” She patted the bag she’d hung over the chair, and though the gesture meant nothing to Nyx, she smiled.
“I see.” She cast about for something to say. “And how’s your apartment? Are you still subletting?”
“What?” Mala frowned, frozen in the act of bringing a sandwich up to her mouth.
“Your apartment. It’s registered to an Eve something. Orion. Oh! Coworker?”
Mala shook her head and put the sandwich down. “Wait. How do you know where I live?”
Shit.
Nyx closed her eyes, her face flushing. “Um…”
“What is this?” Mala shook her head. “Seriously, how did you know what?” She looked scared now, and Nyx held out her hands, trying to calm her.
“I’m so sorry. I should have…I was prying.”
“Yeah, it sounds like you’ve been prying for a while.” Mala took a gulp of her drink and set her glass down hard, the liquid sloshing. “What’s going on here?”
She didn’t even need to guess at Mala’s reaction. The woman wasn’t going to like this. On the other hand, it was clear that Nyx wasn’t going to get out of here without explaining.
“I promised Kiran,” she said quietly.
“You promised Kiran what?” If the sound of her dead brother’s name even made a dent in her rising anger, Nyx could not hear it.
But the memory came back to Nyx, dizzying in its intensity. Everything had been white, dazzling. The papery robe on Kiran’s thin frame, the bandages at his head, the sheets, the walls. White, all of it. Even his eyes seemed bleached in the memory, and Nyx flinched at the memory of the smell from the machines, the medicines … and Kiran.
You will, won’t you?
You’re not going to die.
We both know I am.
“Melissa.” Mala’s voice was hard, dragging her back to the present. “What did you promise?”
Nyx paused, but she could no more deny this promise than she could will herself away from her. Kiran had practically been her brother, her twin. She would have done anything for him.
“I promised him I’d look after you,” she said quietly.
5
The world seemed to turn inside out. Sounds filtered through distorted, as if coming through water. Mala could see Kiran’s smile—not in the last days, when his hair had fallen out and the bones of his face stood out far too clearly, but his smile from their childhood, reckless and full of mischief.
She did not need to ask Melissa if this was real; it was just the sort of thing Kiran would have done.
And yet… Anger pulsed in her veins, mixed with the drenching cold of fear. If Melissa knew this much, if she knew about the apartment, she might know about—
She didn’t know. She couldn’t. if she did, this would be a very different conversation.
“So, what, then?” She knew she should stand up and walk away, but she could not hold back the words. “You’ve been stalking me?”
Melissa flinched away as if she’d been slapped. Her lips were pressed tightly together. Mala waited for the defense, watching the woman’s fingers tighten around her tumbler of whiskey.
“I’m very sorry,” she said finally. “Of course, that would… I’m sorry. I should go.” She slipped off her chair and hesitated. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.
“Wait.” Mala heard the word leave her mouth before she had time to think. Her hand was on the woman’s arm.
“What?” Melissa did not look back.
There was a pause while Mala tried to think of something, anything, to say that would capture the roiling emotions in her chest.
“Stay,” she said finally. She did not have to say the rest of it.
The woman looked back at her, eyes wary, and Mala swallowed hard. In the dim light, gold flecks showed in her brown eyes. The deep brown curls hanging over her shoulders trembled as she held herself still by discipline alone; Mala could not have said if the woman wanted to go or stay. The red lips were no longer smiling. Her beautiful face was grave, even the dimple on her chin giving her no softness.
Mala’s eyes traveled down over the Melissa’s arms, lean muscles under the tan skin, to the confident set of her shoulders.
Who was this woman now? Once, Mala had idolized her. She was the smartest of Kiran’s friends, as much a daughter to their parents as Mala was, herself. Everyone had called her and Kiran twins, and Mala had been torn between a genuine liking for the girl—no one could hate Melissa—and a furious envy. She was Kiran’s sister, not Melissa. Sometimes it seemed that everyone had forgotten the younger child.
She had not expected to feel the rush of desire when she saw Melissa sitting there. Laughing, surrounded by the other members of her Dragon team, she had been utterly in her element, everything Mala would never be. And yet, in that same moment, all of the envy had drained away. Mala no longer wanted to be Melissa—she wanted the woman in her arms, so badly that she shook with it. Now, no matter the shock, she could not forget the easy laughter of a few minutes ago.
“Stay,” Mala repeated. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, you should have. It was…” The other woman shook her head. “I didn’t go digging, or anything. I just looked at public information. I suppose I didn’t want you to feel like I was calling to ask you about your decisions.” She pressed her lips together. “I should just have asked you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
The woman leaned against the bar, looking down into her drink. “We never knew each other all that well, did we?”
“No, but—” Mala broke off.
“But what?”
“You should sit down again.” When Melissa wavered, Mala tried a smile. Her lips were trembling. “Please?”
The woman nodded and sat, the silk rippling over her body in a way that made Mala’s heart race.
“I’d like to get to know you,” Mala said, when she could speak again.
“I’d like to get to know you, too.” Melissa swallowed and looked up. She looked as if she wanted to smile, but wasn’t quite sure this was the right moment for it. “I just want you to know, I won’t check up on you anymore. It was a foolish thing to do. If you want the truth, I think I was afraid to talk about Kiran. I thought I should tell you at the funeral—what he had asked of me.” She blinked away the sheen of tears. “Mala, he was so proud of you.”
Mala looked away, her throat closing. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I do. I should have told you then. He was so sorry at the end. We used to make your life miserable when we were kids, and he said he felt guilty about it. I don’t know if he ever got to tell you himself.”
Mala pressed her hand over her mouth, trying not to cry. She had not talked about Kiran in years, not since she left Dobrevi behind. Not since she fled the house where her mother and father lived in a perpetual grief that threatened to drown her.
“He knew how hard this world could be,” Melissa whispered. Her low voice was breaking on the words. “We saw some things together that…scared him. He said you were destined for something incredible. And he wasn’t just saying it, he really believed it. He talked about you sometimes, you know, even before he got sick. He wanted to make sure that after he was gone, someone would be there to look out for you, so that you could achieve everything you were meant to.” She reached out, her hand covering Mala’s.
Mala turned her head away. She could not speak around the lump in her throat. She had wallowed in her parents’ grief, trying to fix it, trying to do everything in her power not to remind them of Kiran’s death, and as the months stretched on, her careful avoidance had turned to anger. She was still alive, she was still there, and they no longer saw her at all. When she arrived on Seneca, lost and alone, she resolved not to think of it ever again.
She had never grieved for him herself.
“I’m so sorry,” Melissa said. “I should have told you.”
Mala shook her head. “It’s…it’s all right.” She looked down at her hands. “It does sound like him to ask that. But you didn’t need to look out for me. I’m sorry.”
“No. He meant so much to me,” Melissa whispered. When Mala looked back, there were tears tracing their way down the woman’s cheeks. “It was no trouble.”
Her pride pricked and Mala drew her hand away, wiping angrily at her own eyes. So that was why the woman had been so happy to see her, asking about her job. It was for Kiran. Not for her. And then she stopped, considering. She’d seen the flash of appreciation in the woman’s eyes when they first saw one another again. She knew she had, and it had made her shiver. Of course, Melissa had only kept tabs on her for Kiran’s sake. She was right—they hadn’t known each other well.
Mala was going to change that. She gestured to the bartender for a refill on their drinks and smiled over at Melissa.
“I didn’t mean to bring all this up.”
“Oh, no. Don’t apologize.” Melissa shook her head and wiped her eyes again. “I’m pretty sure I was the one who brought it up. So. What should we talk about?”
“Well, how about this? I’ll tell you what’s been going on.”
“Oh, please, you don’t have to.” The woman’s cheeks were flushed. “It’s embarrassing, now that I’m really thinking about it.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed.” Mala smiled over at her. The woman was surprisingly adorable when she was flustered. “I’m, um…so I’m working in Money Laundering. It’s a subdivision of—” No, best not to give her facts she could check. “Well, you don’t care.”
“Nyx! Boss!”
Melissa turned her head to the call, brown eyes lighting on the men. She smiled at the sight of them leaning against one another, clearly tipsy, and lifted her own glass, inclining her head to Mala. “I’ll catch up.”
“Right-o.” A man with reddish-brown hair nodded to Mala and waved the others away as they craned to get a look at Mala.
“What did he call you?”
“What? Oh. Nyx. It’s…” Melissa shrugged. “It’s what I’m called now. A lot of us get call signs. I’m Nyx. Frankly, until these past few weeks, no one had called me Melissa in years.”
“Nyx.” Mala tried the word out on her tongue. “Like to forbid, or like the night?”
“Night. Talon said I could creep up on people as quiet as nightfall, and—” She shook her head. “These are stories you shouldn’t be hearing.”
“Classified or scary?”
“Both.” The woman smiled, looking a bit smug.
“Nyx. I like it.” Mala searched for something to say.
“You were telling me about your life. I’m afraid I know nothing personal at all.”
“There…isn’t much.” It occurred to her now that saying she was single, while it was relevant to her goals, wasn’t exactly a personal recommendation. She sighed.
“What is it?”
And unexpectedly, Mala told her the truth. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she admitted.
“How do you mean? I thought you liked your job.”
Mala shrugged. “The algorithm…it made sense. It all makes sense, sort of, if you think of it as one big machine. People work that way more often than you’d think. But it also feels so pointless sometimes. I wish…” I could be out in the sunshine, rebuilding things, working with my hands.
But that was for provincial nobodies. That was for people who stayed on backwater planets and suffocated under the weight of a world that didn’t even know they existed.
“Are you … seeing anyone?” Nyx’s voice was tentative.
Did she hear hope there? Mala tried not to turn her head too quickly to look at the woman’s face. “No, I … blew off a date tonight.”
“For this?” Nyx sounded horrified.
“What? I like talking to you. But, no,” she added, when Nyx opened her mouth to protest. “No, I forgot. I was at work, and I got caught up in something, and….”
“And what’s the fellow’s name?” Nyx looked over at her, smiling.
Ah. Very interesting.
“Her name is Sela.” Mala watched, biting her lip to keep from smiling, as emotions flitted across the other woman’s face. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ve managed to forget three dates in a row with her. I’d kind of judge her for not breaking up with me at this point.”
Nyx laughed, like she knew she shouldn’t but couldn’t help herself.
“I don’t know what it is,” Mala admitted. “She’s gorgeous. Absolutely, drop-dead gorgeous. But I just don’t…no one I’ve met here…” Makes me laugh like this.
“You’ll find someone.”
“You think so?”
“You?” Nyx looked over at her. “Yeah, I think you’ll find someone.” But she looked away before Mala could smile at her.
Dammit. Mala swallowed her disappointment. “Right.”
“So what about work, then? What got you so caught up that you missed a date?”
“Oh.” Mala felt a rush of excitement again. In the swirl of this evening, she had managed to
forget the day’s triumph. “I finally managed to track down a smuggling ring.”
“Really.”
“Yes. Gerren’s Ore.”
“You’re kidding.” Nyx looked back, clearly not believing Mala at all. “The senate would have found that in a minute.”
Gerren’s Ore, first discovered on one of the moons of Valha, had been fed into convertible fuel engines with astonishing results, and was now one of the most sought-after substances in human space.
“That’s the thing.” Mala looked around herself carefully, and leaned closed, trying not to lose her focus when Nyx’s breath stirred her hair. “Someone in the senate is in on it.”
“What?”
“I kept feeling like something was wrong in the market, and then I realized that if someone were adjusting the expected values in production every month, they could make it look like production was stable. Those numbers aren’t ever released directly, just as percentages of expected production. And tonight, I was finally able to prove that the numbers coming out of the senate subcommittee don’t match the numbers going in.”
“Oh, my God.” Nyx sat back, clearly thinking furiously.
“I’ll figure out who it is soon,” Mala promised.
“You can’t do that.” The answer was instantaneous.
“What?”
“You can’t get involved in this,” Nyx said flatly. “It’s much too dangerous.”
“It’s just numbers. No one even knows I’m looking at it. Well, except—”
“Good.” The Dragon cut her off, and Mala pressed her lips together. “Listen, if ever there was a time for … well, for me to protect you, this is it.”
She’s only ever going to think of you as a little sister. The voice in her head was snide, and Mala shoved it away. “Listen—”
“No. Mala, you listen to me: senators can be dangerous. The way they reacted when we went after Soras … it scares me. Please say you won’t go digging into this.”
“But if I don’t, they’ll get away with it.” Mala’s voice rose.
“No.” The woman shook her head. “I’ll—we’ll look into it. Ourselves. I promise I will find the truth and get those responsible to face justice.”