by Audrey Faye
He nodded at the seat up front beside him. “Get much chance to fly working for KarmaCorp?”
Not on the books—Fixers were supposed to keep a low profile. “Officially my feet stay on the ground unless someone else is driving.”
His lips twitched. “Noted.”
Damn. I’d come here because I had a job to do, and because somewhere between the terrace and the landing pad I’d latched on to the desperate hope that getting to know Devan better would have the effect it usually did. Most guys had pimples if you opened your eyes wide enough, and it was hell on the attraction hormones.
In this case, hell was exactly what I needed—and not at all what I was getting.
A crack. I just needed one stinking, tiny crack. In him, and a few dozen less in me.
I felt the vibrations underneath us pick up as the b-pod lifted off the ground. A textbook take-off—maybe there was a reason his sister was a solar mechanic. Devan tapped a couple of touch screens and leaned back, a man in his element. “Okay, Ophelia, let’s get out of here.”
I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking to me. “Ophelia?”
He grinned. “First girl my dad ever kissed.”
Definitely a story there. “Does Evgenia know that?”
He laughed. “She named the ship.”
I never wanted to meet either of his parents in a dark tunnel. “You have an interesting family.”
“Yeah.” Devan flew placidly over the edges of the Lovatt compound and then stepped on the gas and angled sharply up and left. Ophelia climbed steeply, and with the kind of pent-up energy that suggested she was just getting started.
I could practically feel my fingers twitching. She was tuned to be a pilot’s dream.
He looked over at me, eyes full of simple happiness. “You want to fly her?”
I did, every millimeter of me—and I wasn’t at all happy he knew that. “That would be a really bad idea.”
His mouth twitched. “I doubt it.”
“You should say no.”
“Not gonna.” He took his hands off the manuals. “All yours.”
I’d spent the last few days fighting every primal urge I had—I wasn’t going to fight this one. My hands were on the controls before either of us could blink or he could change his mind. Ophelia vibrated under my palms, saying hello. I rolled her a little, one side to the other. Returning the welcome.
Devan grinned beside me and tightened his straps.
I could have told him not to bother—Ophelia and I were going to fly smooth as silk. We had nothing but open skies and trailing winds, and she was as done with sedate as I was. “Okay if I bump up the speed a little?”
The man beside me chuckled.
I rolled my eyes. “You should say no.”
“Not gonna.”
That was as much permission as my pent-up demon child needed. I pushed forward on Ophelia’s throttles, feeling the purr and the roar sing through me. And realized I’d finally done something entirely right. This was exactly what I’d needed. I opened up to the power under my hands, feeling all my cranky, frazzled energy burn away in the pure pursuit of speed.
The grasslands waved underneath us, dancing with Ophelia’s flight. I moved with the waves, pushing the ship through a zinging figure eight just because I could. And then laughed and drove straight for the horizon.
I had no idea how long it was before I came back to my senses and wistfully lifted my hands off the manuals. “Sorry—I don’t know where we’re going.”
Devan smiled beside me and took over the controls. “No need to get there in a straight line.”
Pretty sure we’d deep-sixed that flight plan. “Thanks. She’s amazing to fly.”
He was watching me from his seat, eyes full of curiosity and something deeper. “Your singing is beautiful.”
I blinked. “What?”
He shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable. “You’ve got a really nice voice.”
I hadn’t intended to use it. I listened, sighing when I heard the fading subsonic echoes. Lingering traces of Song in full throttle.
Damn. That was a serious breach of Fixer protocol—Talents were supposed to stay under control. It wasn’t the first time mine had leaked out from a pilot’s seat, though. I looked down at my hands, remembering. Sitting on my dad’s lap, barely big enough to see over the instrument panels as we flew over the barren surface of the digger rock we called home. I’d pushed buttons, banked us hard left, held on tight, and sung my three-year-old heart out.
It was one of my first memories, and one of my happiest. “I used to do that when I was a kid.”
“Really?” His smile landed in his eyes first. “Janelle’s mom sings to her horses, but I’ve never heard of anyone singing to their transpo.”
Janelle was the last person I wanted to be thinking about right now. I stared out at the waving grasslands, trying to hold on to the pure, clear zing of flight.
Devan switched the ship into auto and engaged some kind of fancy shielding that blanked out the view. “Don’t worry, I’ve set down here often enough that I could land blind, but Ophelia has great nav.”
I wasn’t worried. Not about the navigation, anyhow. “Why are we landing without visuals?”
“Because I’m about to show you one of BroThree’s best-kept secrets, and it’s better to discover it from the ground.”
I’d seen the Lovatt compound off in the hazy distance before the shields had gone up—we’d essentially flown in a great big circle. “You sound like you do this a lot.” The royal tour guide.
He looked over at me, vivid brown eyes no longer casual and light. “You’re only the third person I’ve ever brought here.”
I had no idea what to do with that.
He dropped the b-pod’s landing gear into place and set her down as easy as if he’d been driving a beetle. I knew enough to be impressed.
He cast me a glance. “Close your eyes.”
I blinked. “What?”
He grinned. “Just do it, okay? Let me surprise you.”
I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and let his hands navigate me out the b-pod’s doors. His touch blew whatever peace I had left from Ophelia’s flight to tattered shreds.
The ground under our feet softened as we walked, and the air took on a sweet, clear scent. I could hear water, but my sense of direction was totally befuddled by the lack of visuals.
“Here.” Devan pulled me to a stop, his warm breath coming just over my right ear. “Welcome to one of my favorite places.”
I opened my eyes and stared. I’d expected majesty—big mountains or soaring vistas. Not a quiet little meadow by a gurgling stream. Flowers danced in splashes of sunlight and mossy stumps beckoned from the shadows.
Something in my heart took a long, slow dive.
Devan pointed a finger over top of my shoulder. “I used to hang out on those branches right there and watch the water go by for hours.”
I looked at the tree limbs reaching out over the water, wide and inviting and low enough for naked toes to reach the gurgles. “How did you manage to hide away for that long?” Digger-rock children weren’t tracked all that closely, but I imagined that wasn’t true for the son of planetary royalty.
“I jiggered the b-pod tracking.” He grinned. “My parents thought I spent a lot of time holed up in my room studying.”
His parents hadn’t struck me as idiots. “How long did it take for you to get busted?”
“Never did.” He shrugged. “Not officially, anyhow.”
Someone had known—and someone had allowed a boy his hiding place, one where his feet might play in the waters of the planet he would one day rule. I scowled—I didn’t want reasons to like the people who had decided that their son should be married off to smooth their planet’s entry into the Federation.
My Song spurted out notes of undulating frustration, mad accompaniment to the fraying nerves under my skin.
I headed for the branches over the water. “Mind if I sit in your tree
?”
“Go ahead.” He was watching me carefully, a little wary. “I’ll just go over here and throw pebbles.”
The man didn’t miss much. I felt his eyes following me as I made my way through the small brambles and weeds that grew over the base of the leaning tree. It had that slightly abandoned feeling, like it hadn’t been visited as often lately.
I sang a riff of quiet comfort to the stream. Its boy had come back.
The stream returned my riff, laughing as Devan’s pebbles splashed into its gurgles. I peeled off my skin boots and wiggled my naked toes. Tee’s father had taught me that—touch the earth, feel the water.
I stuck my feet in, gasping a little at the cold.
Devan grinned from his spot on the riverbank. “It gets warmer later in the year.”
His words barely registered. Song had risen from the stream, straight up through my toes and into the spaces between my ribs where music lived. Lush, passionate notes, and underneath them, the Song of the man at the water’s edge.
Ophelia had cleared my chakras. Now the water and the man sought to fill them.
I perched, statue still, helpless to leave the swamp of personal entanglement that had threatened this mission from the first moment I’d set foot on this planet.
Devan’s eyes smiled at me as a pebble dropped into the water.
I watched as he reached for another, and then I let the cold water wrap and warble around my toes—and I listened. To a stream and a man who were both agreeable on the surface, but refused to be pinned down. To a man with long practice at evading capture who had learned some of his most important lessons from this very stream. To the gratitude of the water, and of the man the boy had become. To the bond between them.
Devan Lovatt would never leave this place.
My head tipped down, protecting the sadness rising in my eyes. I let my heart rest for one long, aching moment in the certainty that he could never be mine.
And then I tumbled myself into the song of a boy who knew how to fall in love with a small river. That man was saying no to another love, and I didn’t yet truly know why. The reasons people resisted were often deep and complicated and obscure. Perhaps if I swam deeper, I could see how to help.
The water gurgled at my back, guiding me. Nudging. Helping me to truly see the man.
And ran me straight into a seed so small that for a moment, I didn’t recognize it for what it was.
My Song balked. I cowered, fingers digging into tree bark. I didn’t want to see—and I couldn’t look away.
“Hey.” Devan’s hand touched my arm, voice laced with concern. “You okay?”
If I had been, I wasn’t now.
I gathered courage I didn’t know I had and tipped my head up to meet his eyes.
The seed was there, nestled inside him. Interest and opening, kindling desire. It only needed water to grow.
Except it wasn’t Janelle he turned toward. It was me.
My soul retched, wanting only to water that seed and sing to it softly of love and heartbreak. To watch its first bright-green shoots grow and to bathe them in impossible, happy light.
For one shattering moment, to let it be real.
Instead, I reached into Devan’s hand, took the small black pebble in his fingers, and dropped it into the stream near my feet. I watched the ripples as it landed, watched my toes change the patterns. Listened to the minute shifts in the song of the stream that had been forever changed by my visit.
To water the seed would be a purely selfish act—and I had chosen to serve.
I sent one inaudible riff of torment into the water. A cry for my heart—for promises I had not truly understood the weight of until now, for possibilities that would never get a chance to be.
And for what would come next, because I knew the true awfulness that lived in this moment. I had found the crack I needed, sitting in the one place I’d never thought to look—in the connection between him and me.
Singers could work with what existed. I had only to point the man my heart yearned for at someone else.
I looked at Devan one more time, aware that he was watching me with deep concern. And forced out six desolate words.
“I need to go back now.”
18
I eased my way off the landing pad, listening to the sounds of Ophelia leaving behind me. Devan had dropped me off, no questions asked—just a quiet hand on my shoulder that had nearly done me in.
I didn’t have it in me to turn around and wave good-bye. All my focus was on getting my poor, bedraggled body to take one step at a time along the path to Tameka’s cabin. I’d come because I couldn’t face the Lovatt compound. And I’d come to do the thing I should have done the moment I laid eyes on Devan Lovatt.
“Hello there, Singer.” Tameka squatted in front of a small bush near the corner of her patio. “I’ve got some iced tea over here, if you’d like to pour us both a glass.”
My arms were working only a little better than my legs. I made my way over to the edge of the patio and sat down gingerly.
She looked at me and grinned. “How’s Dusty?”
Probably laughing his ass off in a field somewhere. “Walking better than I am.”
“It’ll wear off in a day or two.” She wielded a small pair of clippers on an errant twig. “I’m glad you got out—the grasslands seem to speak to you.”
My ride with Janelle seemed the stuff of time long past. I took a deep breath. “I came to ask for your help.”
She scanned me more carefully, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing.
I waited, knowing I was asking her to step across a lot of lines. Help was explicitly something our local contacts weren’t supposed to hand out. And I was acutely aware that I was seeking it from the woman who had faced this same assignment once and said no.
Tameka trimmed a small sprig off the branch nearest the ground. “Is my girl giving you grief?”
I didn’t like the possessives in that sentence at all. “More or less.”
Her hum was one of pure satisfaction. “Figured so.”
She didn’t have as much figured as she thought. “She’s considering the idea.”
The old Dancer’s eyebrows flew up in surprise. She rested her snipping tool on the ground and regarded me a long moment. “Is that your work or hers?”
That wasn’t a simple question. “Both. Not anything I did, but maybe something I said.”
“Words have power.” Tameka’s fingers moved up the branch, sure and steady—Tee’s family would have hired her in a second. “And you coming here changed things before you Sang a damn note.”
I hadn’t Sung any good ones. “KarmaCorp will think I shifted her. I want you to tell them the truth.” I owed a friend that much.
She glanced at me curiously. “If you like. They may find it difficult to believe.”
“Do you?”
“No.” Tameka smiled wryly. “KarmaCorp doesn’t know my girl. Janelle’s a woman capable of changing her own mind. It sounds like maybe she has.”
I wished I could share her confidence, but the truth was, I’d never know. I leaned back against a post on her porch, my throat feeling like pulverized rock. I knew what I had to ask next, and I hated every necessary iota of it. “That isn’t the help I came to ask for.”
Her eyebrows raised again. “You have at least half your mission underway. Seems like you’re doing pretty well.”
“It’s the other half that’s the problem.”
“Devan?” Tameka chuckled and moved her hands to a higher branch. “If Janelle’s coming around, you might just leave that part up to her.”
The glass shards in my gut heaved. “It won’t be fast enough.” I needed them pointed at each other, and I needed it now, so that I could get the hell off this planet and pull my shit back together before I did something eternally stupid.
“Ah.” Tameka spoke the single syllable very quietly. “I didn’t see that coming.”
My eyes flew to her face, reading the surprise.
The empathy. The quietly dawning fascination. And the subtle movements of her hands as she put her Talent in motion.
Verifying what she already knew.
“I know you didn’t want to be the one to shift Janelle, but she’s on the move now.” I hated the desperate edge in my voice. “A little nudge on the Inheritor Elect and they can live happily ever after.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” My host had her clippers back in her hand, shearing twigs merrily. “It sounds to me like this isn’t anywhere near the end just yet. Very interesting.”
That was the last thing in the galaxy I wanted it to be. The nausea rose higher up my throat. “Please.” I was perilously close to begging. “You’ve got the Talent to shift him.”
Her eyebrows were damned expressive. “So do you.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and told the abject, unvarnished truth. “I don’t know if I can.” I had found the cracks. I wasn’t at all sure I could find the courage to use them.
Small, strong fingers briefly gripped mine. “Then I guess you’ve got a bit of a mess on your hands.”
“You won’t help.”
“Oh, I might be very willing to help if you asked for the right kind of assistance. But I don’t think this is it.”
“It’s what KarmaCorp ordered.” And retired or not, she damn well worked for the same company I did.
“It is.” A long pause as she reached for a branch at eye level and tugged it loose from its neighbors. “Sounds like your ride on Dusty jiggled quite a few things loose.”
Dusty had begun the shaking. A man and his stream had finished it. “This can’t be about me—I knew that before I ever got placed on field assignment. So did you.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes rules and genetics butt heads. And when they do, DNA usually wins.”
I’d been found on the side of a digger rock. “My DNA has pretty sketchy origins.”
“You’re a literalist, are you?” Her hands moved in graceful swirls, still holding the clippers. “I believe we grow our DNA, choose it. Or it chooses us. You’re far more than a cog in the KarmaCorp wheel, and I suspect you’ve always known that.”
The blonde demon child had known it. I had no idea what I knew anymore. “I got sent here to be a cog.”