by Elsa Jade
“If only you had been a shroud,” the empress mused. “We could’ve cut out the rot in our branches when we first found you, and we’d still have Tartaula Secondus.”
If the ruling families hadn’t barricaded themselves in the highest reaches of their trees, maybe they would’ve noticed their underlings had decided to do some pruning. Nell folded her arms in a convoluted display of acquiescence. “Though the matrix ordered by His Most High Excellency, the Lord Eletanvor the Sixth, is long demised, like your grandfather, I hope you find the remaining shroud a valuable addition to your household.” She hesitated but then figured it never hurt to overstate things with the dramatic empress. “This Theta is irreplaceably rare. The only feral shroud ever to be reclaimed.”
The empress chattered out another excited call, gathering her attendants around her. “Little Nell, have the shroud prepared for display at the demise-feast. Such a trophy should be seen where everyone can admire.” Her luminescing fur flashed. “And fear.”
Nell genuflected again as the empress swept away. The plasteel decking was cold and rough under her palms, and she kept her gaze low until the scuffle of soft slippers—the Tartaulans wore open-toe shoes to free their long, extra-jointed toes for climbing—was lost in the general din of the hangar.
Admiration and fear. Almost she could hear Troy’s mocking laugh in her ear. A Theta would surely approve of the empress’s theatrical exploits. Of all the beings in the universe who could play the exiled ruler’s endless games, it would be Troy Lehigh. He would have an easy, even entertaining life at the empress’s side—and a long one compared to what would happen if he went up against the consortium.
But would Eletanvine notice that he was sometimes too clever for his own good? Would she care that he had a sweet tooth and liked to share his treats?
Slowly, Nell pushed to her feet, aching in ways that had nothing to do with the hard deck.
Had she made the right choice? She’d been so shattered when she realized he’d faked the problems with the shuttle. Mostly, she’d been mad at herself, falling for his ruse.
Falling for him.
She’d burned through the shuttle’s limited store of emergency power to summon Captain Gul-gah. The Ajellomene had always been kind to her, saying she reminded him of one of his dozens of offspring. When she’d finally gotten the courage once to ask him how, exactly, when she didn’t have tentacles, suckers, or bubbles, he’d said, “Our spawn have a floating period before they develop enough suction strength to hold on.” He’d waved one of his tentacles vaguely. “You don’t seem ready to hold on.”
But how could she when she had nothing to hold on to? While the flat lands where she’d been born had no oceans, she’d drifted in a laudanum haze until she bumped into Troy. But he’d moved on and left her, just like all the others. At least now she’d see him sometimes.
It wasn’t the consolation she’d thought it would be.
After retrieving her personal belongings from the shuttle, she made her way through the barge. As one of the empress’s oldest toys, she had a small private compartment on a lower deck. The compartment was larger than the living quarters of the shuttle, though not by much. At least it had a partial galley unit where she deposited the coffee she’d taken from Earth. She’d have to find a likely trading partner on the barge, either someone with a taste for exotic stimulants or connections to Earther expatriates who would pay gladly top credits for the beverage. The profit would go a long way toward insulating her from the empress’s unpredictable charity.
If she never drank it again herself, just as well, since now the smell would remind her of her last cup, steaming in her hand on the barren moon as she stared at the perfectly functional power lines and realized belatedly that Troy had only ever lied to her.
Then she put herself through the compact cleansing unit to erase the last scent of him from her skin. But when she finally fell asleep after hours of restless turning in the tiny bunk that somehow felt too large, she dreamed of floating away.
The next ship-day, with the demise-feast approaching, the barge staff were busy, distracted, and grumpy. Not so unlike the saloon on a Saturday morning, waiting for the cowboys to come off the range. Or a Saturday night preacher, waiting for the Sunday morning sinners.
Nell approached one of the barge under-chefs with the coffee. The empress’s personal chef would demand the beans by royal decree, but the under-chef was willing to deal for the chance to impress the lead chef. After settling on a price—too high for the grumbling chef, too low for Nell—they exchanged the elaborate signaling that closed the deal.
“Everybody’s talking about your shroud,” the chef said. “But next time you go home, bring back some kale. I’ve heard things about kale.”
Halfway through the description of the chef’s interest in foreign cuisine, Nell shook her head. “I won’t be going back. Not worth risking the wrath of Her Most High Excellency.”
“Not even for kale?”
“I know nothing about it.” Her life on the small planet of Earth was so far away now. Not just in lightyears either. Going back, she’d had no flash of nostalgia, only the resolve to find the missing Theta.
She’d done so—found and captured and delivered a rogue shroud—and yet she stood here still feeling lost. More confused than learning that anyone in the universe actually wanted to eat a tough, flavorless leaf just because it was supposedly good and wholesome. She wanted sugared coffee and too-young wine and flying her own ship to places she’d never been before.
She wanted Troy Lehigh.
Except she’d given him up and walked away from him. Just as she’d left behind the farm a century ago, like she’d abandoned herself to the laudanum and Jed James’s crimes, and all but lost her humanity as the empress’s toy.
Someday she’d go back to Earth, maybe, and see if there was anything she should’ve kept besides the scars.
But now the demise-feast was only one ship’s cycle away. With cajoling, haranguing, and a bit of bribery, she requisitioned a fine tailoring for Troy from the overburdened clothing stores who were all awash in orders for the gala. But Troy needed to look his best to win the empress’s sanction.
When asked to accompany the tailor, Nell declined, citing her own need to prepare for the gala. She couldn’t face Troy after his betrayal. And her own.
She updated her own wardrobe, bartered away more of the precious coffee for another feast gift—facing Her Most High Excellency without a sweetener in hand was a poor bet—and shared a quick meal with Gul-gah, who had only a momentary break in ferrying guests to the feast from a bevy of visiting ships gathering around the royal barge.
“The traffic out there is terrible.” He let out a few weary bubbles. “Hard to keep track of it all with everyone vying for the closest orbits. Silly, really, to burn such fuel and memories out here in the black for a long-dead tyrant. Lady Eletanvine doesn’t have to be the seventh if she wanted to go be the first of something else.”
Nell blinked at his bluntness. “At least you have a ship. Why don’t you fly away from here?”
The fizzing foam that was his amusement was cool on her skin when he patted her hand. “I do fly away, Little Nell. I just keep coming back.”
Such a vast universe, and yet somehow the trajectories were as petty and cramped as her long-ago bed in a forgotten saloon.
When she rose, Gul-gah waved at her. “Don’t forget your gift.”
No chance of that.
***
The brig on the Tartaulan barge was vastly better defended than the shuttle’s hold, and the stasis cuffs were tuned high enough that even idle pacing was converted to restraining energy. There was no way even a shroud could break out.
Also, Troy wasn’t trying to escape.
What was the point? There wasn’t anything out there for him. What he wanted was here, somewhere.
But she didn’t want him. He hadn’t been clever enough to win her love. And without her emotional schemata to copy, how cou
ld he love in return?
Instead, it seemed he’d be given to the empress as a gift, finally obtain his activation code, and serve his keyholder until his own demise.
No worse than he deserved.
Conscious of the security apparatus keeping watch over his every move, with armed guards somewhere not far away, he sat motionless in his cell, not giving the cuffs any more power than the lift of his chest as he breathed. He kept the slow, isometric contractions of his muscles too subtle for the cuffs to register, and if his nanites seethed with the urge to break free, to go in search of Nell, they were buried too deep for anyone to notice.
“I’m here to take him up.”
At the sound of the voice, the cuffs tightened in warning around his limbs and neck. Obviously he’d done a terrible job at hiding his response. Since he’d already given himself away, he opened his eyes.
Nell stood outside the transparent plasteel of his cell, tapping her booted toe impatiently as she spoke into the comm panel in the wall.
She was dressed in an elaborate restoration of the clothing he’d first seen her in, sashaying toward the card table in the dusty saloon, all ruffles and ivory eyelet. Her hair was piled high in ringlets, maroon strands dangling down to frame her pockmarked cheeks. The red slash of pigment across her mouth was as bright as Earther blood, the seductive color disguising the hard set of her lips.
The cuffs tightened another notch as parts of him responded to her nearness instinctively.
“The shroud is classified as a lethal weapon, and as such should not be displayed at the gala—”
“He’s a treasure,” Nell interrupted. “My treasure. And I’m taking him to the party.” She stomped her boot. “I’m the empress’s favorite doll, you know. Don’t twig me about this.”
The comm panel was silent for a long moment, and Troy could imagine the conversations that were crackling on the other end.
When the door to his cell slid open, she strode forward, holding out an armful of black fabric. “Put it on, Theta.”
He stood slowly, aware of some toggle ready to jolt him into oblivion if he so much as twitched the wrong way. The sleeveless tunic and snug leggings were the closest to shroud tactical armor that he’d possessed since the crash. It wasn’t the same, of course, lacking the crucial matrix integrations that would’ve made him part of a team. Still, it was better than the silky robe that he couldn’t quite keep closed.
Shamelessly—partly to tease her—he stripped out of the robe and stood naked as he shook out the costume. And costume it was: both of them playing their roles for the empress’s party.
This was the programming that trapped them.
She glanced away as he dressed and pulled on the matching black boots. Against the airy, pale flounces and puffs of her tightly cinched gown, his matte black clothing, relieved only by thin traceries of silver, was a sinister contrast.
She looked him over once and gave a sharp nod before turning back to the comm panel. “Let us out. Now.”
Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?
But he found himself holding his breath until the outer doorway opened at her imperious command.
“If only I’d known it was that easy,” he murmured.
“I had to give up all the coffee I stole from Earth,” she hissed back. “I’ll probably never taste another mocha frappuccino again ever.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m something of a genius with a galley processor.”
“Of all the skills listed for the matrix designations, I don’t remember anything about being a barista.”
“We are all more than the sum of our parts.” He followed her out the door, not looking back.
They caught a service lift crammed with servants and party supplies headed for the feast. Despite the small space, the crowd took one look at him and managed to make room in the corner for him and Nell.
She stared straight ahead, as if heedless of the unease around her, so Troy was silent as well, following her lead.
He’d follow her anywhere, he decided.
It wasn’t until they exited the lift and plunged into a heavy stream of inhabitants and conveyances that she spoke low under her breath. “I can’t remove the cuffs, not without raising suspicion, but in a few steps, the section of corridor is out of view of active surveillance and I’ll turn off the limiter.”
“Oh, so this is a rescue?”
As they rounded a corner, she pushed up against him, crowding him toward the wall out of the path of oncoming beings and traffic. Under cover of some quick groping, she touched his neck and wrists, presumably entering a deactivation order. Though he felt no difference in the tightness of the cuffs, his heart raced and his blood surged—not from freedom of the restraints but from her nearness.
The consortium engineers hadn’t been entirely wrong to try to use the mate bond for their controls. In this moment, he’d do anything for her.
“We’re going after the consortium,” she said.
The surging thrill of her jailbreak crashed like a ship into an unexpected asteroid field. “Wha— We?”
“All the other shrouds, they are trapped, just as you are. You all should be freed. And you’re the only one who can do it, the only unclaimed shroud left after the death of your matrix.”
Guilt at this reminder of yet another of his lies deflated him like a pierced hull. “I’m not the only survivor of my matrix,” he confessed. “Three others survived. They are still in Montana, living as Earthers now. They’ve bonded to Earther mates which is how I know that the imprinting protocol can be subverted. It’s also where I got the cipher to disable the consortium’s control, permanently.”
She backed away from him, almost stepping into the flow of traffic, but he grabbed her arm and reeled her closer again.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he said urgently. “I told you they were lost after the crash, because they were lost to me. Thetas stay on the outside, always, and I thought the best way to keep them safe was to stay far away from them.” He glanced away from her. “The one time I broke that promise to myself, I almost made a terrible mistake that would’ve destroyed the lives they’d made. I won’t do that again, not even to save the rest of our kind. That’s why I decided I had to go alone.”
Gazing up at him, after a moment, she blew out a hard breath. “I get it. You had no reason to trust me.”
“I trust you now,” he assured her, gripping her shoulders. “Which is why I’m telling you about them. And I’m also telling you that you can’t go with me.”
She lifted one eyebrow. “I wasn’t asking.”
A frantic sort of desperation tightened around him worse than the stasis cuffs. “Nell, it’s too dangerous. I expect to die doing this.”
She straightened her shoulders under his hands, the taut stance reminding him that she wasn’t just a scarred little Earther girl. “I thought sure I was dying every time the empress put me away in stasis. But I kept coming back.” Her stormy gaze locked on his. “The nanites killed my habit of dulling the world with laudanum. And now that I’ve caught and tamed a rogue shroud, I can’t even drift through this universe telling myself that I had no other choice. Maybe I can’t do everything, maybe my own code is too simple, but I can do a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever believed—or than anyone’s ever believed about me.”
A despairing kind of pride made him pull her close again, tight to his heart. How could he stop her from going with him? Oh, but he would, to keep her safe even if it sacrificed this desire of hers to be more. At least she’d be alive.
He kissed the top of her head, crushing the ringlets and inhaling the unique perfume of her skin that was only hers in all the universe. “Nell…”
“I won’t stay here any longer. I can’t.” She tipped her head back to gaze at him. “And in case you’re about to try to deny me, you should know that I’ve already prepped the ship we’re going to steal. No one’s leaving me behind this time.”
“You are so bad,” he said admiring
ly.
“You gave me the nanites,” she reminded him. “This is all your fault.”
Unable to resist, he dipped his head to slant his mouth over hers. Her taste, that too he would never mistake or forget. Maybe he’d shared his nanites, but she’d taken them and made them something else.
“Like nothing else in this universe,” he whispered against her lips.
“That’s why we’re doing this together,” she said. “You want your full activation codes, and so do I. For myself.”
Not the response to his kiss that he’d been expecting. He raised his head to blink at her. “Codes for you?”
“I’m half shroud already, with your nanites.” When he sputtered, she amended, “Partly shroud. If I have all the protocols, all the power, and you disable the imprinting, no one will be able to take advantage of me ever again.”
He pushed her out to arm’s length, the better to glare at her. “Being a shroud doesn’t protect you. It’s the opposite; it makes you a predator.”
Her jaw set at a stubborn angle. “If I am full shroud, I can fight and fuck and not feel, just like you.”
“You can’t be a shroud,” he sputtered. “You don’t have the cybernetic implants. And you don’t have the proprietary interface to properly command the nanites.”
With a toss of her head, the garnet locks around her face danced defiantly. “That’s why I’m going with you. We’re going to steal all that from the consortium.”
Despite the months of vigilant, secretive discipline, partly enforced by stasis cuffs and blaster shots, his nanites surged through his body to face the threat she had conjured just with her words.
“Steal from the consortium?” The din of the crowded deck was like low screaming in his ears. “They are a covert, centuries-old war syndicate that designs and builds the most feared, illegal private armies in the intergalactic community. You are a half-blind whore and I am a failed cowboy. We couldn’t sneak out a single nanite without them finding us, killing us, and recycling us for parts.”
She lifted her chin. “Speak for yourself. My light fingers and quick tongue added nicely to my nightly wages from Jed. And as for you… Remember, the consortium never caught you.” She shot him an impish smile. “I did.”