by Loren Rhoads
She hoped he would be home soon.
* * *
Thallian’s son was asleep when Raena spied on him through the window into his cell. Even though he could hardly be comfortable stretched out on his back and pinned in place by the lockdown cuffs, he slumped on the bench, mouth open and snoring. Raena thought it kind of charming. When she was a kid, she had been able to sleep anywhere, too.
Raena opened the hatch. The boy snapped awake, tense as a wire. The scent of the air changed when his eyes caught her. Raena inhaled deeply, licked her lips, and stepped inside. “I’ve brought you some dinner,” she said. “Nothing fancy, just ship’s rations. I never had time to learn to cook.”
She set the tray on the floor, dragged the chair over nearer the bunk, and sat down. She felt the chair’s magnetic feet seal to the deck.
“Let me up,” the boy growled.
“Oh, no, Jain. If I stun you too many times, there’s a chance of permanent nerve damage. Your father showed me what that looks like on a prisoner. It’s not pretty. So we’re going to deliver you back to him fully functional, if that’s okay with you.” She set the tray on his chest. “I’ll feed you.”
He thrashed as much as he could, tipping the tray to the floor. Raena smiled, but didn’t bend down to pick it up.
“The smell of that food is really going to bother you in a couple of hours,” she predicted. “You’ll be sorry you wasted it and sorry you can’t get down there and lap it up.”
He glared at her and demanded, “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. Can you believe it?” She sat back in the chair and propped her heels up on the edge of the bunk near his head. He spat on her boot soles. She left her feet where they were. “I can’t imagine that you know anything of interest to me,” she told him.
He chose not to argue. “Where are you taking me?”
“Home.”
“My home?”
“I’ve never had one, myself,” she said. “Well, I lived in that tomb for twenty years. I suppose that counts as home, sort of. You wouldn’t last long in there. Did you ever go inside? It wasn’t the blackness or the cold or the hunger so much as the solitude.”
He ignored her, so Raena continued. “I watched the video where you set off my landslide. Nice piece of work, didn’t you think? Been a long time since I’d rigged a demolition—might have overdone it just a little. I didn’t mean to take down the whole mountainside. It looked like I killed two of your guards.”
“And blew out my hearing,” the boy said. “Luckily, Uncle Revan was able to patch me up.”
“I’m glad. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be enjoying our conversation now.”
He had to twist his neck to hold his head up enough to see her. Judging from his expression, he thought she was crazy. He let his head relax back onto the bench.
“Did you find my message?”
“One of the men did. They found the hair you left, too. We sent it home to my father with the wounded.”
Goosebumps rippled over her. Great. One of her hairs was now in the hands of a man who’d cloned human shields. Something else she would have to deal with when she reached Thallian.
“Yes, Jain,” she answered, “we’re going to your home.”
This time he flinched. “You know where it is?”
“Of course. One of your brothers betrayed it. When I leave you alone, you’ll have time to work out which one it was. Maybe, if you’re polite, I’ll tell you when you guess correctly.”
“You can leave me alone now.”
“I could,” Raena agreed. “But I thought we might chat a little longer.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Then you can listen,” she said. “I want to tell you a story about my relationship with your father.”
* * *
At fourteen she’d been a slave for three years. She wasn’t particularly unhappy. At least, she couldn’t put her finger on one thing where she could say, “Yes, my life would be less hellish if this were different.”
Of course, she couldn’t go wherever she wanted, or take a day off, or be alone. She couldn’t leave the compound without a specific errand. She had to play nice with Ariel’s spoiled rich friends and the kids they slummed with. Still, slavery meant that Raena wasn’t living in the street or whoring for some filthy junkie pimp to keep herself in chemicals. Ariel’s connections provided all the chemicals they needed, clean and uncut, straight out of a laboratory, in exchange for guns Ariel stole from her father’s factory. Raena’s job was to see that Ariel didn’t get killed by one of those same guns.
So the work, as she understood it, wasn’t all that different when she took Thallian’s offer of employment. She knew from the beginning that he was an agent of the Empire, but she begged him to take her along anyway. This slave was running away.
She hadn’t thought farther ahead than that. It surprised her when Thallian put his aide out of his cabin and installed Raena there. She’d never had a room of her own, so she didn’t question her good fortune.
The beatings began as soon as Thallian required her to fence with him. No matter that she’d never held a sword before. He wanted to underline how unworthy she was to carry one.
As he handed her the wooden practice sword, he snatched the medallion from her throat. Her hands were full of the wooden sword hilt, but she managed to catch the chain.
Thallian cracked her wrist with his own practice sword. Clumsily, she yanked her hand back and forced her throbbing fingers to support her own sword. Thallian attacked her at full speed.
She did what she could to protect her head from the rain of blows. By necessity, that left her body open to Thallian’s attack. He chose a point on her right thigh where he hit her repeatedly, returning again and again to it after each combination of blows. Eventually, despite her determination, the leg refused to support her weight any longer. It dropped her to the mat.
The point of Thallian’s sword followed her down. He nudged her chin up just a bit with the blunt sword point. He added enough pressure on her throat that she understood he could kill her if he chose to, even with a blunt wooden sword.
“You don’t deserve to guard me,” he said. “Your size is a dare that many beings will not be able to refuse. You look like an easy target. A joke. So until you can prove differently to me, I will keep your weapons for your own safety.”
Thallian withdrew his sword point, only to strike her sharply on her forearm. Her nerveless fingers dropped her sword.
As hard as it was to hear, Raena understood his reasoning. Tears of pain and frustration rose to her eyes, but she blinked them back. She crawled up onto all fours and touched her head to the mat.
“You have something to say?” Thallian asked.
“When is my next lesson?”
* * *
“Why did you tell me that?” Jain wondered.
“Because we have something in common,” the woman told him. “We were both trained by your father to withstand pain.”
Was that a threat? Jain closed his eyes. An image of the man Lim flashed through his mind: drooling, begging incoherently, only fear keeping him from blacking out.
Zacari had arranged her chair so that Jain could only see her by straining. He wanted to watch her, to see what she would do next, to dodge the blow when it came, but she’d made it uncomfortable and awkward to do so.
Finally, he could stand the tension no longer. He opened his eyes and twisted around to look at her.
She hadn’t moved. Her boots were still propped up near his head. There was something eerily lighthearted in her expression, despite the scar between her eyebrows and the blackness of her eyes. Her crazy, staticky hair made her look fun, youthful. He knew she was really a freak as old as his mom, preserved by her twenty years in prison. It didn’t matter. She smelled wonderful. Exotic. Enticing. Dangerous.
“Ready for me to go?” she asked.
“Yes,” he hissed at her.
“All right.”
/> She got up from her chair and strode across the cell on her ludicrous high heels. The black leggings she wore left very little to his imagination. Even so, the smoke-gray bomber jacket she wore as a top could conceal any number of threatening implements in its many pockets.
She didn’t turn back as she left the cell.
Once the air had settled, Jain discovered she was right. The smell of the food he’d spilled across the floor made his stomach grumble. He hadn’t eaten since they’d landed on Kai, and then only a quick carb bar because he’d been so eager for the hunt.
He tried not to imagine himself eating dinner off the floor, but any thought of food only made his mouth water now.
He forced his thoughts to his father and shivered. What would Jain ever tell him?
* * *
Mykah was in the common area as Raena passed through. Since everyone else had something to do, he’d made it his mission to track down all the weapons cached on the transport. Now he had an impressive array spread out on every flat surface and grouped roughly by type.
“They were armed for bear,” he told Raena.
She smiled. “What’s that mean?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “It’s something my grandfather used to say. It meant they were armed to hunt something big and dangerous.”
“That would be me,” she said casually, picking up one of the little pistols to check its charge. Fully loaded.
“Thought so.” Mykah lounged back against the wall. “So what’s your deal? Were you government-engineered?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. My mom was crazy, part of this radical militant cult back in the Imperial days. I grew up being trained to fight for humanity.”
He nodded, as if he expected her to continue. She chose not to. No point in freaking him out or in telling truths no sane person would believe.
He surprised her by saying, “You’re older than you look. That girl in the Imperial wanted poster, that’s you.”
Raena looked up from the weapons to give him her full attention. “Where’d you see that?”
“Coni’s finding it easier to break the encryption on stuff they imported into the log—the old Imperial files—than the stuff they recorded firsthand.”
“That makes sense. So you know I was charged with Imperial treason by the guy I’m going to meet, the kid’s father.”
“There’s a recording of your trial in there, too,” Mykah said. He didn’t seem especially excited by this or threatened by it, nothing more than massively intrigued. It was still all a game to him, she realized. A live-action puzzle.
“Were the charges true?” he asked. “The mining prison, the ships, the soldiers . . .”
She nodded.
“Then why didn’t they execute you? Wasn’t that what the Empire did back in the day?”
“It was complicated,” she admitted. “I wanted them to kill me. I expected it. But they decided to use me as a way to punish Thallian. I was imprisoned as a way to threaten him, to keep him in line.”
“They imprisoned you in stasis? Is that why you haven’t aged?”
“I wish it had been stasis. That would have been kinder.” The grin that split her face felt like a skull’s grimace. She shook her head, shook it away. “It was a long sentence. It gave me a lot of time to think.”
“And you decided to go after this crazy fucker, right?”
“Right. He created me. So I’m the only one who can take him down.”
Mykah glanced away from her at the piles of weapons. Raena let him change the subject. “You want a lesson on all this stuff?”
He beamed like he’d just hit the jackpot.
* * *
“I need to use the commode,” the boy told Raena when she eventually checked on him again. His tone told her that he was used to issuing orders, to having them obeyed. Several of his brothers in the family portraits were older, but Jain was clearly the alpha. Raena wondered if he was his father’s favorite, if that’s why he’d been singled out for this little adventure.
“Did you hear me?” he repeated. Anxiety made his voice strident.
Raena drew the Stinger pistol from the holster on her thigh. It was a sporting weapon meant for precision target shooting, but it could drop a man with minimal damage to the body. She changed the settings with an audible click. Then she placed the barrel against his temple.
“I heard you, Jain. Now I want you to listen to me. Think about your dead Uncle Revan. Think about how fast I am. Think about whether you want to see your family or your home again. You have a full bladder and you haven’t eaten in at least ten hours. Do you want to try me?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to unlock the restraints.” She stepped back a couple of paces and pressed a button on the remote in her pocket.
“And leave me some privacy?” he asked hopefully, rubbing his wrists.
“No.”
Once he’d gotten up, she sat on the foot of the bench, pistol steady in her hand. “These are nice weapons,” she said conversationally. “Antique, though, like the transport. I’d say the family’s fortune is running out, isn’t it? No money for new toys.”
Raena gave the boy time to answer, but he didn’t rise to it. She hadn’t really intended him to, but she wanted the conversation to feel the way he expected—cat and mouse—so he could feel superior to it. She wanted to feed his sense of entitlement, his self-worth, because that would be an easy way to dismantle him later.
“Unfortunately, galactic memories are long. No one’s forgotten that the Thallian family engineered the plague that wiped out the Templars. No one’s forgotten that your father was the ‘diplomat’ who disseminated the plague.”
He still didn’t argue, but she could see the tension gathering across his back as he hunched against the truth.
“As long as you have to protect your dad, all of you have to hide together in silence, watching your treasures fall apart around you. Without Jonan, you could change your names, leave your home, lead your own lives. It must be very frustrating for you.”
The boy smiled at her, revealing sharpened teeth. Raena forced herself not to flinch. Jain was younger now than she’d ever known Jonan, but she could see the old man in his son. Their eyes were the same shade of silver. They shared the same cheekbones, the same jawline. Raena wondered if the boy would grow a beard like his father’s when he was old enough.
“It’s worse for us,” Jain said. “We all have his face. His DNA. Even if he died, we couldn’t go out into the galaxy. Any ID check anywhere would recognize us for the mass murderer our father was.”
“Trapped like rats,” Raena summarized.
Jain bristled, but didn’t argue.
He flushed the commode and reassembled his black clothing.
As he crossed back toward her, she waved the pistol toward the bucket she’d set down inside the door. “Wash the floor.”
“What?” He stared at her, so shocked by the order that he couldn’t parse it.
“You heard me. There’s a brush in there, too. Get down and scrub up your mess.”
The boy dragged the bucket over to the spilled food and slopped some water onto the floor. Grudgingly, he knelt down and began to scrub. Then he said, “My father will kill you.”
Raena laughed. “I’m sure Jonan has a lot of things in mind for me, but killing me is the last thing I can look forward to from him.”
She settled back onto the bench and said, “Let me tell you another story.”
* * *
She didn’t like the situation very much, but it wasn’t for her to like or dislike. Thallian invited the delegation of nobles on board the Arbiter, seemingly with the intention of offering them Imperial hospitality. He arranged an ambassadorial reception in the main conference room.
The Chief Minister was as conciliatory as one could desire. He did not deny there was terrorist activity in his system. He offered to work with Imperial authorities to ferret out the terrorists. After the bombardment of his c
apital city, which Thallian’s arrival had ended, he agreed to the establishment of an Imperial base in the ruins of the former Ministry building.
Raena didn’t trust him and neither did Thallian. She stood at attention behind her commander’s chair and kept her face impassive as the negotiations spun out. Everyone had stepped through an energy scanner on their way into the room. Her dress sword and Thallian’s sidearm were the only weapons she could see. She expected the attack to come from some form of edged weapon, which meant the assailant had to be within arm’s reach of Thallian. She watched the men closest to him intently.
She felt the change when the weapon was drawn, saw the ambassador shrink away from Thallian and the new Imperial governor he had installed. She eased her sword from its sheath, but did not strike yet. She knew better than to create martyrs.
The Imperial governor’s head exploded, showering Thallian’s cape and the floor. The smells of death and surprise clouded the air. Raena pulled Thallian behind the Chief Minister—standard Imperial procedure. Using Thallian’s shoulder for leverage, she vaulted onto the tabletop.
One of the men at the far end of the room had some sort of primitive projectile weapon, something that had escaped the energy scans. He was momentarily paralyzed by the enormity of what he had done: taken a life and dragged his homeworld into the War.
Even as Raena neared him, she saw the shock wearing off to be replaced by resolve. The bore of the weapon swung toward Thallian. Raena dodged between him and the gun.
As she raised her sword blade for a quick kill, the gun went off.
The sharp impact spun her away. She turned on legs that were still steady and brought the sword slashing diagonally through the assassin’s body. The stroke decapitated him and removed his weapon arm.
Security officers clattered into the room, stun staves ready. The native party stepped away from the bargaining table, hands meekly raised.
Raena meant to leap down from the tabletop to secure the weapon, but somehow she misjudged her footing. Pain was a fire consuming her strength. Still clutching her sword, she dragged herself across the floor toward the severed arm.