by Natalie Grey
Talon, you priceless bastard. Tersi tried to take another sip of water and thought better of it; he was going to get it up his nose if he couldn’t stop laughing, and he really couldn’t.
“Tersi?”
“It’s, ah—” He choked a bit on a laugh. “You’d really have to know Talon to get it.”
She folded her arms. “Well, try to explain it to me, then.”
“Think back—did he ever actually tell you he’d be here?” Tersi gave her a grin. “Or did you simply assume that from context?”
“Oh. I—let’s see…. No, he didn’t, now that I think of it. Why?”
“He’s, ah….” Tersi’s lips twitched. Given us his blessing. “He wants us to talk.”
She stared at him for a minute. “So he locked us in here?” She sounded like she was pretty sure Tersi must, definitively, be wrong.
“Talon’s not always a subtle dude.” He was beginning to smile.
“So I can see.” But, despite herself, she was smiling back. She took a deep breath and seemed to work up her courage. “So, if we’re supposed to talk, then—wait. Are they listening?”
Tersi raised his voice and pitched it towards the comms at the side of the room. “They’d better not be.” He shrugged. “Best I can give you, sorry.”
“Right.” She gave a look at the comms and sighed, then ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, if we’re doing this, just let me get this out, all right?”
Tersi nodded. He admired the attitude. She’d been avoiding him, and she clearly wanted to run away, but she wasn’t going to sit here in sullen silence—she was going to tackle the issue head on. He gestured for her to speak.
“I don’t really know how to do this,” Dess said in a rush. “Any of….” She gestured at him. “This.”
“What, like—” Just in time, he remembered he wasn’t talking to another soldier. He shook his head as a never mind gesture and waved his hand for her to continue.
“We always knew we’d be running away someday,” Dess explained. “So I didn’t ever allow a relationship to get very far. I didn’t want to have to break things off, or take the chance of letting something slip, or…. Well, it’s not important.” She paused. “Or, actually, it kind of is. I didn’t want to have someone punished because I left,” she finished quietly. She let out her breath. “So all of this stuff kind of fell off my radar and when I first met you, I thought—it’s someone who’s not caught up in all of this. But, of course, you are.”
“Not in the same way,” Tersi said quietly.
“I got you caught up in it.”
“People like Ghost, we’d go after with or without you defecting.” He shrugged. “Nyx was already on her tail before you even showed up—and you think Ghost carries grudges? Don’t piss Nyx off, goddamn.”
Dess was startled into a laugh. She put her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders. She looked incredibly young that way, miles away from the ice-cold professional negotiator who’d given her presentation in the war room the day before.
She sobered, though, biting her lip. “And—I know you’re grieving someone.”
Before he even thought, the words were out of his mouth: “I think, of everyone, she’d be the one thumping me over the head with a brick and telling me to go for it.” The words surprised him, and he stopped, a lump in his throat. He looked down at the mats with a little laugh and tried to keep the tears from his eyes.
Because it was true. If Sphinx could speak to him from beyond the grave, it was exactly what she would be saying—and she’d have added some pretty choice language about him not having gone for it already.
There was an awkward silence.
“So, where does that leave us?” Dess asked.
“Fuck if I know. I don’t do this sort of thing. Being a Dragon isn’t usually conducive to relationships.” Tersi crossed his arms and cleared his throat. “Uh….”
“Oh, my God,” Talon said softly. He was leaning over the back of Jester’s chair in the cockpit. “This is it. This is how we’re going to die. Of second-hand awkward.”
Jester stifled a laugh and Jim gave a snort.
“Maybe we could, you know—well, the next time you have shore leave—” Dess was stumbling over her words.
“Just kiss her.” Jester was banging his head on the control panel. “Jesus Christ, it is not that complicated.”
Talon put his head on arms, trying not to guffaw.
“What’s going on in there?” Aegis’s voice filtered up the hallway.
“Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!” Talon hissed, gesturing to Jester hurriedly, but Dess’s voice was still coming out of the speakers as Aegis came into the cockpit.
“Hi,” Talon said brightly. “Any paperwork I need to do?”
“That is the worst cover I have ever seen,” Aegis told him. He looked at the three of them. “Spying on those two? You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”
“But they’re so bad at this,” Jester said, with deep feeling. “You can’t look away.”
Aegis reached past him and flipped the comm switch off. “All right, all of you get out. Let them figure out what’s going on.” He pointed meaningfully at Talon. “And I am telling Nyx that you locked them in a room together.”
“No,” Talon protested. “No, you don’t need to tell her. She’ll get on my case.”
“Tersi will get on your case. She’ll just make fun of you. Out.” Aegis shoved all three of them out of the cockpit and closed the door.
“There.” Tersi dragged the last of the mats into place to make for a makeshift bench. “Better than nothing, I guess.”
“Someone’s going to open that door at some point, right?” Dess asked, as she came over to join him. “We’re not going to starve to death or anything.”
Tersi tapped his wrist comm unit. “I’ll give Aegis a call. He’s pretty likely to let us out if we ask.” He did a double-take at her expression. “What?”
“You haven’t asked him yet,” Dess said. She sounded pleased, and she blushed a little as he looked at her.
Tersi felt something bubbling up in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a quite a while: a simple, uncomplicated happiness. There was something easy about it—and yet it was so sharp that he wasn’t sure how to exist with it twisting in his chest. He just wasn’t quite sure what to do with that feeling yet, so he sat and jerked his head for her to sit down as well.
She did, perching cross-legged like she wasn’t quite sure what to do.
“Tell me about you,” Tersi said, to put her at ease.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She hunched her shoulders. “Hostage negotiator. That’s pretty much it.”
“What’s something you like? A hobby.”
She looked at him blankly for a moment before shrugging. She shook her head. “Harry always liked building things. That made sense, of course. He was an engineer, he knew how. Hard to turn hostage negotiating into a hobby, though. I remember one time, he built—”
“Not Harry,” Tersi said patiently. “Tell me something about you.”
“I don’t know,” Dess protested.
“Okay. Walk me through your day.”
“I get up. I go running. Make some breakfast—something easy. Well, shower, then breakfast. Work on cases. Go home, make some dinner. Maybe read.”
“What do you read? And don’t say case files.”
“Sometimes it’s case files.”
“Goddammit.”
She was laughing. “But sometimes I read—well, not history, really. Books about Old Earth, these little pieces of history that don’t matter much anymore, but stories set during them. Historical fiction. So, like, during certain wars or monarchies.”
“So, really old.” He was intrigued. “Why do you like that so much, do you think?”
“I like seeing how people lived,” Dess said. Her gaze was fixed on the far wall and she swayed a little as she thought. “I suppose there’s no way to know how accurate any of it is, though. But
they were so clever, the way they did things before they had any of our technology.” She considered, and her shoulders hunched. “I guess, maybe something I got from Aunt Maryam—Ghost—” she met his eyes briefly “—was the idea that you really could make a perfect world.”
“Ghost believes that? You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not.” She was laughing again, wryly. “I know it sounds crazy from the outside, right? But, if you consider somewhere like Ymir—Eternas isn’t really like that. Sure, a lot of things are controlled and the family rules it and if you’re a part of the family … well, you know.” She waved a hand. “But it’s not people in chains going into the mines or anything. People live well—in terms of food and luxuries and things like that. Not in terms of certain freedoms.”
“Certain freedoms?”
“Democracy.” Dess shrugged. “They can choose how they live their lives, what job they do, that sort of thing. But if someone took over the family who was really cruel, they probably couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Huh.” It had never occurred to him that Eternas was anything but bad. “You’re saying people don’t hate it there?”
“There’s never been an uprising that I know of,” Dess said honestly. “Aunt Maryam always told me that the most important thing was to keep people’s bellies full, not let them ever fear that there wouldn’t be enough to go around. She more than delivered on that, even when the family grumbled. Some of them thought they should have more of a share than they did, she really cut the money train down so most of the profits went into the infrastructure and so on. That was probably from the Gerren’s Ore, now that I think of it.” She shook her head. “And they’re abandoning it all. I suppose it’s good for the Alliance.”
“I suppose.” Tersi had been watching her, and now he found himself wondering something else. “Are you ever homesick?”
“Sometimes.” She admitted it easily. “I didn’t like being afraid all the time growing up, but it’s the only home I really knew. It’s hard to think I’ll never go back there.”
“You won’t?” Tersi raised an eyebrow.
“Well, I—” She blinked.
“Because it seems to me, when the family isn’t in charge anymore, you could go back.”
“I could go back,” Dess said slowly. “I could go back.” She looked up at him.
“Maybe you could show me where you grew up.” He was smiling at her, and he wanted to laugh when he saw her blush—not meanly, not as a mockery, but simply because everything about her delighted him.
“I’d like that,” she told him, nodding. She was uncertain, but all of her uncertainty couldn’t hide how glad she was at the thought.
When Tersi’s hand cupped her face, she froze. He drew her close and she leaned forward hesitantly, eyes searching his—and so he waited. Somehow, all he could think was that she was so small. He was afraid he might hurt her.
She wasn’t afraid, though. She tangled her hands in the front of his shirt, careless of the sweat, and smiled as she pulled him down to her.
And her recklessness was infectious. He didn’t worry about anything for a good long while after that—he didn’t think at all, in fact. He surrendered to all of it with relief. All there was, was Dess, and it was enough.
It was more than enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
LEAVING his apartment was strangely difficult. John Hugo walked from room to room, searching for whatever he might have forgotten to pack. Something was nagging at him and right now, readying himself for a negotiation he feared, he was superstitious about leaving until he remembered what his mind was trying to tell him.
He had been through the whole apartment three times before he noticed it: the faint smell of Rhea’s spring coat, now shut away in a closet. When she was here, she invariably flung it over the back of the couch as soon as she arrived home—but in her absence, Hugo had not been able to bear the sight of it. He had hung it up carefully while he fought the urge to bury his face in it and sob.
Now he opened the closet and drew it out. It was getting too small for her, but she loved it and wouldn’t let him buy her a new one. Tears came to his eyes as he smoothed his hand over the teal fabric.
She was why he didn’t want to leave, he saw now. He was staying in the house with the fading memories of her, clinging to something that was no longer here.
All the knowledge in the world didn’t make it easier to leave, however. By the time he returned, he had a feeling that Rhea’s last echoes, the silly songs she sang before dinner, the way she ran circles around the couch with her nanny, would be gone.
And if he had not returned with her, he would be entirely alone in the apartment.
He laid the coat carefully over the back of the couch. It wasn’t as careless as it would be if she had thrown it there, but it was a good reminder.
Behind him, there was a footstep, and another scent he recognized.
“I can’t place your perfume,” he said, half-looking over his shoulder.
There was a pause. “I think keeping any secret from the Head of Intelligence is a victory,” Lesedi said lightly. She came to join him at the couch and her elegant fingers reached out to arrange the zipper pull just so. For a moment she looked so sad that Hugo wondered who she had loved and lost.
Then she said, “You were right about Dess.”
“I know.” He hadn’t been planning to bring it up.
“I know you know.” She sounded faintly prickly. “The point is that I’m acknowledging it.”
“Ah. Yes.” He found himself smiling, and looked away so she would not see it.
“Are you ready to go?” When he looked back, she was once more her usual self: cool and collected. The prickliness had disappeared, leaving her public face. Her expression was, as he had noticed it often was, one of secret amusement. It was not a mockery of the situation, she simply viewed the world as one of infinite possibilities.
Right now, that was exactly what he needed. John Hugo smiled at her and touched the coat one last time, as a talisman.
“I’m ready,” he said, and then he followed her to the door.
In the cockpit of the Ariane, Tersi carefully waited as the contents of the message became clear. He was aware of the others watching him, but he did not pay them any particular mind. He was used to them thinking of his work as some strange kind of voodoo.
At last he looked over at Talon and gave a slight nod. “They’re on their way.”
It had been a trick to get messages onto and off of Tian Station without being monitored. Lesedi had embedded most of it in additions to the market data that flowed at a constant rate through the news channels of every station in Allied space. The markets on Seneca, serving so many different worlds, never closed. The system could always be used.
Now all Tersi had to do was send a message as well—not to the Io, but to the shuttle the Ariane had left on the relatively close Yora Terminal, an Alliance scrap yard. The Io would meet the shuttle there, and carry John Hugo and the others to Tian Station.
Tersi embedded this next message just as carefully, and found himself worrying that Esu and Stabby would not be able to read it correctly. He’d given them both a thorough briefing before they left, but part of him remained worried that they would miss the opening pings, or—
They were professionals, he told himself. They would receive the message.
He finished embedding it and swiveled around in his chair, standing to let Talon sit back down in the co-pilot’s chair.
Talon, however, did not move from his place in the doorway. He lounged, arms crossed. “So?” he asked innocently.
“So?” Tersi’s voice was just as innocent.
“I knew it,” Jester muttered. “You couldn’t close, could you?”
Tersi gave him a look that reminded Jester just who was in charge of paperwork and galley duty assignments. Jester looked hastily back to his control panel and became very engrossed with making sure the ship was still properly
docked.
“It depends,” Tersi told Talon.
“What does it depend on?” Talon asked pointedly.
“How long you were listening.”
There was a twinkle in Talon’s eye. “Not very long. Aegis is about as strict as Nyx when it comes to decorum.”
“Almost as strict?” Aegis called from somewhere down the hall. “She went easy on you all!”
“He also has hearing that’s more acute than I tend to remember,” Talon said, with a faint frown over his shoulder. He looked back and gave Tersi a wink. “Just sayin’, you seem to have a little more spring in your step today.”
“Mm-hmm,” Tersi said blandly.
Jester had been trying to stay out of it, but now he looked up, clearly just as curious as Talon. “And neither of you showed up at dinner,” he pointed out.
“Mm-hmm.”
Both of them stared at him, and Tersi stared back equably.
“So….” Talon shot a look at Jester, and then looked back to Tersi. “We get no details? None?”
“None,” Tersi said airily, and he slid out of the cockpit with a last, sweet smile at both of them. “That’s what you get for listening in.”
“Oh, come on!” Talon called after him, laughing. “Do you know how often we went out of our way not to walk in on you before?”
Tersi turned to give a grin over his shoulder. There was a time when Talon wouldn’t even have joked about Sphinx, and where it would have hurt Tersi far too much to acknowledge it. But something had shifted, and both of them knew it.
He still, however, took a perverse pleasure in leaving without providing even the scantest details. He whistled to himself as he walked, grinning.
Just let them try to eavesdrop on his cabin or Dess’s. They’d be in for a rude shock when they activated the comm systems: every album and artist he knew they hated, played at high volume—in their cabins as well.