by TylerRose.
“So you are unharmed?”
“Why so interested if you’re not going to be my lover?” she challenged.
“I am fond of you, Tyler. I’ll not hide that. He was charged with and convicted of conspiracy to kidnap persons out of their place in time, which is an actual crime. Plus false imprisonment and rape for you. He’s been sent to the penal mining planet Quarint for ten years.”
“Is that all? I’d think those charges would get him more.”
“Doesn’t matter. If he’s in the mines, he’ll be dead in five years. If he’s not in the mines, he’ll be dead in seven. That’s the nature and purpose of the mines. It’s for people who cannot be killed outright but the powers that be would rather they be dead.”
She humphed. “Earnol threatened to send me there if I attempted to go back to Earth and fix it.”
“Did he? I dislike the man more every day.”
“I’ve noticed a number of people on the Congressional station don’t like him.”
Their plates arrived and conversation halted for some minutes as they began to eat. Meal finished and pitcher emptied, they went up to the strip club. The room was packed and her arrival brought roars of approval. On the stage, she gave the music man her memory chip.
“Number three and number twenty one.”
If You Think You Know How to Love Me and Promises in the Dark.
The first song mesmerized the crowd and the second blew them away. Shestna felt that thing so many others did. He felt that greatness, that ability to reach through the energies of the universe and touch the soul. That thing that made all these men fall into love and lust with her.
“Guard her closely,” he said very quietly to Arran, seeing many men take a Rolcha by the hand to buy for an hour or two. “She’s very important. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
“Ohhh, trust me. She knows it,” Arran replied.
“She being quite the handful?”
“More than you know.”
“I do know, Arran. I know her well enough to know that she will continue to be contrary until you find a way to become her lover. Then she will acquiesce to your security requirements.”
“I thought you were her lover. Here you’re telling me to be?” Arran questioned.
“I am not and probably never will be. She does not have one at the moment, in either place in time.”
“If you have never been her lover, how do you know she would defer to her lover?”
“She is a strong young woman. She needs a safe place with someone she can trust to let all that go. I recognize it. My mother is the same way. Only with my father does she become soft. So it will be with Tyler.”
“She insists on being called Rose here,” Arran informed him.
“Perhaps. She has not informed me of that preference,” Shestna replied, seeing her come out of the dressing room.
He met her halfway, kissed her cheek.
“That was magnificent, Femina. You have a voice that is a gift from the gods.”
“Thank you. I’ll do it again next hour.”
“But I must be going. We do have to limit our time here.”
“We? The royal we?” she teased.
“Meaning visitors here to check up on things. I leave you in Arran’s capable hands. Don’t be too hard on him. It wasn’t his fault his former employer was a hubby.”
“Hubby? That means husband,” she said, confused by the term.
“In Voranian, it means a disreputable trader. I’ll be back in a few days.”
Almost immediately after he vanished, there was a ruckus at Jeera’s table, a patron shouting bloody murder. Tyler and Arran both approached to intercede.
“What’s the problem?” she cut in.
“This Rolcha tells me I have to pay one hundred Ruds to fuck a single Rolcha for an hour,” the irate Sistarian thundered.
“Yes, that’s correct. Plus you have to rent a room for the hour. There are no common quarters anymore.”
“So one hour with one whore costs me two hundred Ruds,” he complained.
“Yes. This is no common fuck ‘em and leave brothel anymore. This is a resort casino that happens to have Rolcha for personal entertainment.”
“Two days ago—“
“This is not two days ago!” she interrupted him hotly. “If you don’t like it, leave. Go to some whore on the planet below. I don’t care. Arran, escort this man to Arrivals. He’s holding up the line and I don’t want his business.”
She walked away. Arran nodded to the team of two men with him and they assisted the patron in finding Departures. Arran followed Tyler, determined to keep her safe in these early days. Many other men were escorted off the station through the evening. Many more were happy to learn the games were no longer rigged, the station was drug free, and the ladies could come to their rooms. Every overnight room was filled long before close and the hourly rooms turned over every hour and a half until close. The extra half hour giving Housekeeping time to get in and clean up the room for the next patron.
She let Arran sleep in the second bedroom but she went to her bed alone. Waiting on her desk in the morning was the list of girls who wanted to go home. Seventeen of them. Not bad, all things considered. She’d expected half to want to leave. The lure of better conditions and easy money did it every time. Ms. Chase had hired a number of girls away from other escort services because she treated them well.
She scanned down the planet names. Sistair was easy. There was a transport back and forth nearly every day since the station was often used as a stop off hub. She might be able to make something of that in the future. Some of the planets she’d heard of but they weren’t in the Congress yet.
“Bowmares? Bow-mars?” she sounded out, and looked up to Jeera. “Where’s that?”
“I have no idea and they cannot tell me. All they know is that the system itself is rather closed off. The people don’t do space travel except within their own solar system and that’s just a few people for their own protection. Like for defense and envoys from one planet to another.”
“What other planets are there?” Tyler asked.
“None I’ve ever heard of. One is called Tavereegees.”
“Do they even know where in the galaxy they are?”
“No. I’ve explained, using the star maps on the system computer. But if they include this system, it’s not identified,” Jeera apologized.
Tyler sighed hard, hating to not be able to get them back to where they belonged.
“Okay. Not much I can do about it. Give them jobs as waitresses or in Housekeeping or Arrivals if they don’t want to be comfort women. As soon as I can figure out where they’re from, I will gladly put them on a ship and send them back. Give this list to Vaus so he can get his team working on their money. Tell him to give them their money in Ruds or their home currency, as they choose, and give them another thousand Ruds on top for traveling expenses. Get them on the next transport they can be packed and ready for.”
“Some of them are rather far out, Miss Rose. They don’t come this way.”
“Call the Landers to deliver those girls,” Tyler said, holding out the paper. “It’s their job anyway.”
“I have my own copy. This is yours,” Jeera said, and left Tyler alone to think about the girls.
Bowmares…the name was familiar but she didn’t know from where.
A plate of food was set down in front of her.
“It’s too early to eat,” she said, turning to her computer.
“Most people eat more than once a day. You’ve been sitting there for at least two hours. You’ve been up for at least four and you’ve not eaten. It is not too early,” Arran said.
Blinking out of the depths of her brain and back to the moment, she registered the time.
“Oh.”
“Do you do that often? Forget time and to eat?”
“I eat when I’m hungry,” she said absently, picking up the Voranian sausage sandwich while still reading the screen. “Any calls for help from th
e girls?”
“None last night. We have given the same instructions to the male Rolcha. They can be roughed up too. Business is just starting for today,” he replied. “You think it wise to open for the day so early?”
“I think this money pit needs all the hours of the day it can possibly have to earn its keep. Even if it’s just the Emporium levels, we need to have people here spending their money. Eventually, we will be a round-the-clock operation.”
Arran made no reply, letting her eat. He would argue against perpetual operation at another time.
Finished and checking her watch, she excused herself to go up to the penthouse for a while before getting ready for the evening. She emptied one of the spare bedrooms. Window blinds closed, she brought in an easy chair and a small table with room for an ashtray and her water. Music player from the front room easily duplicated, she put it on a shelf on the wall to her left. Speakers went up on three walls around the front end of the room.
Satisfied, she went to get a glass of ice, a pitcher of ice water, and her packed pipe. A few tokes to get a buzz going, she programmed twenty songs into the player. Taking her place, she started to jam out her stresses. Two songs an hour four or five times a night was not enough to blow off steam.
After one song, she paused. Something was missing. Looking down, she saw the empty carpet. That’s what was missing. Concentrating on the image in her mind, she created a copy of the rose she stood on when performing with Mickey’s band Piledriver. With it in place, she continued for another half hour without interruption.
“You are fantastic,” she heard from behind her, and looked over her shoulder to see Shestna in the doorway.
She’d not felt him approach or arrive.
“You just left last night.”
“Yes, but it has been five days on my end,” he said, coming in to sit in the chair. “By all means, don’t let me stop you. I could listen to you sing all day.”
Flick of a finger shut off the machine and she left the room, the lights going out as she passed through the door.
“You didn’t have to stop on my account.”
“You should have knocked. Don’t intrude on me like that.”
“I don’t understand the problem.”
“It’s private!” she turned on him, snarling with a tone that stunned him to stillness.
Like a devil within had been released in those two seconds, with solid black eyes and as foul a temperament as he’d ever encountered. Just as fast, it was gone. Her blue eyes had returned and she was stomping away.
“I’m sorry, Femina. I did not realize,” he decided was best to say.
“Go shopping or something. I have to get showered and ready for the evening,” she said, disappearing into the bedroom corridor.
She changed first into cloth leggings and a long, plain tunic and put on a cloak that she’d quietly commissioned days earlier from the tailor on board the station. Thinking hard and focusing, she found a little church in the English countryside and teleported to it.
The first thing she noticed was the freshness of the air. No large industrial cities in this area meant no large clouds of disgusting pollution. The sun was down. There was no moon tonight. Such a natural darkness, without artificial lights blazing along streets and inside houses. She smelled the green of the trees, the fragrance of roses. It was summer. There were no houses here. They were a bit down the road, the church up a hill. The world felt so very different. Quieter. Not so heavy and repressive.
There was no word Immaculate in the name of this church, but it would do. The year being 1515, Henry VIII’s war on the Pope had not yet begun. It was still a Catholic church.
Cloak hood up, she went to the bank of candles and dropped one of her little gold rings into the donation box. She began lighting candles. Tears in her eyes, she used the candles to let go the anger and frustration she’d been trying to release through song. Being stopped short had intensified her emotions.
Trapped nearly five hundred years in the past. Another thing Earnol had lied about. Out of the way and forced to do nothing while millions of people were murdered. While her mother died. And Nails and Dicer and Roxanne and everyone else she ever cared about. Dropping to her knees as they went weak with the power of her grief, she wept for them. Only here was she removed enough that she could finally relieve herself of the first wave of anguish.
“Dear child, what grieves you thus that it takes every candle to illuminate your soul?”
“Nothing you can help me with,” she said quietly.
“A confession, perhaps?”
“I’ve done nothing to confess.”
“Nothing? No fornication?” he asked. “Or lying?”
“Well, there’s lying and there’s lying, isn’t there. I was intentionally locked away so I could not prevent the deaths of those I love. That is all I can say.”
“You hold yourself accountable and carry the guilt of their deaths though you had nothing whatever to do with the act?” he asked.
“I’m angry at myself for not realizing it. I carry the guilt of not being able to do anything.”
“Guilt is for the one who did the deed.”
“He feels no such thing,” she said, getting to her feet. “He would do it a thousand times if he had to, to obtain his objective.”
“What is his objective?”
“To get rid of me.”
“Why? Are you heiress to a great fortune?”
“My crime, apparently, is being born.”
With a decisive wave of her hand, she thrust a wind over the candles to extinguish them. And teleported away.
Hades smiled to himself as the wisps of smoke rose from the fifty wicks. He’d felt her arrive days ago, too far away to contact but obviously out of her time and place. That familiar energy he’d known for over two thousand years, for having held it in its earliest infancy.
She was about eighteen years old. Healthy and strong, if in a young body. Starting on her path to self-discovery, obviously having had her first Widening. He would have to watch out for her in the coming centuries, noting the odd accent he did not recognize. He knew all the peoples of the world. All their tongues and accents. This one was new.
There was a new world just beginning to be discovered and occupied. Perhaps she would emerge there.
He took the ring she’d dropped into the box and slid it onto his pinkie finger —such a small hand she had—and her recent life stole his breath away. Intense angers, destruction, a broken-bond crisis, forced sex. So much anger.
He breathed the scent of her once more, searing her into his memory, and teleported back to the mountain known as Olympus.
“Well?” Hermes asked, pulling on a sock over the wing tattooed on the back of his foot and stepping into a boot.
“I was right. She’s blonde and blue eyed and not from Europe or Gethis. Soon as we can, we need to go to the New World.”
“You’ve already been there for centuries,” Hermes said.
“She has enemies and knows who some of them are. We need to be among the populace to watch and wait for her. That means waiting for the new colonies to be established and travel back and forth from Europe to the New World to be commonplace so we can go unnoticed.”
“What about your penance?”
“Never you mind about that,” Hades said, and took his soul-gathering form to fly out around the diseased countryside and escort the dead back to the Source to be recycled.
He had a great deal to think over, and sat on a rocky ledge on the side of a mountain to look down on the dark villages below.
The bond broken had been with himself. If he died while she was so young, she could not succeed until she found a suitable replacement for his spot in the final pentagon. That could take decades. Odin thought he could pick replacements, but Hades knew it didn’t work that way. She would pick the replacements. No one else. Forcing one on her would be disastrous.
Feeling better after her visit to the church, Tyler soaked in the
tub of hot water for half an hour. “As the World Falls Down” from the movie Labyrinth played over and over. Eyes closed, having toked from her pipe again, and she remembered the first time she’d met Kevin. She’d been eleven. In the movie theater all by herself, or so she’d thought she was. Her friends had been in another theater watching something she didn’t want to see and she’d left them to go into Labyrinth for the fourth time.
Alone in the theater, sitting in the middle, having totally lost herself in the movie, lost track of time, forgotten the world and her own loneliness. She’d sung along with most of the songs, particularly this one. When the movie was over, she’d sat through the credits nearly in tears that it was over. Standing, turning to go up the aisle, she saw him in the back row.
That same old cliché…tall, dark and handsome. Wearing a business suit with a white handkerchief.
He was at the door the same time she was, and offered her the handkerchief to wipe her eyes, which she was wiping with the edge of her sleeve.
“You sing beautifully, do you know?”
She’d been too shy, too shocked and embarrassed to know that someone was there, to say anything.
“I have a friend who owns a band. He’s always looking for good female singers. He lets the high school kids join them for practices on weekends, and sometimes for actual gigs.”
A card was between his fingers, held out to her. She took it, giving him back the handkerchief.
“You should go sometime.”
He pushed the door open for her, let her walk through first. That was the last time she went to see the movie. She’d bought the cd instead to sing at home with the rest of her repertoire when her mother wasn’t there. A year and a half later, Mickey let her sing at a wedding. Kevin had been there. Half a year after that, she was fronting while they played the Iron Knaves clubhouse, and he’d become the family lawyer.
Tyler sank under the water, holding her breath to prevent herself from crying again. She was tired of crying. She didn’t know how long she’d remained under and she didn’t care. She stayed down until she could sit up and breathe without bursting into tears.
Shestna had ended up on the Emporium levels, and escorted her around the little carts.