by Jaleta Clegg
“Who is Leon? He looks like a clown.”
“He owes us.”
“You trust him?”
I shrugged. I twisted my wrists inside the cuffs, scraping off the pink layer. He studied my hands, his face the stone mask that showed nothing. I stopped twitching.
He caught my gaze. “You know how to get all charges dropped, Dace. One assignment, and all three of you go free.”
My heart broke all over again. “I’m just your assignment. Do whatever it takes to recruit her. Isn’t that what Lowell said?” My eyes burned with tears.
He looked away, but not before I saw the guilty twitch.
“Go away, Tayvis,” I whispered.
“Dace, don’t do this.”
“Go away!”
He held out his hand, a mute appeal.
I turned away. “You’re his pawn. I refuse to be one.”
He touched my shoulder. “Dace, listen to me.”
I shook my head and shifted my shoulder from under his hand. “Go away. Tell Lowell to leave me alone.”
He stood behind me for a moment. I felt the heat of him like a sun warming my back. He turned and left. The door clicked shut. I shivered in a sudden chill. I hated sending him away, but he worked for Lowell. I couldn’t trust him. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to keep the tears back. One escaped, tracing a hot path across my cheek. I sniffled and wiped it away with the back of one hand, the other following, trapped in the cuffs the same way I’d be trapped if I listened to Tayvis.
The guard came to fetch me. I blinked the tears away, refusing to humiliate myself in front of him. He took me to my cell and locked me in.
Chapter Thirty
They didn’t cuff us the next morning. Lady Rina, seated in the front row, looked especially pleased.
The judge entered, mellower than the day before. He shot a single glance at Lady Rina before bashing the podium with his gavel. “Defense, you may begin.”
Leon stood, puffing out his chest. He reminded me of the dimwitted sparrows that strutted and fought outside the dormitory window at the orphanage. I’d envied them, I still did. They could always fly away from problems.
Jasyn leaned close while Leon interrogated a shopkeeper from Tebros who claimed we cost him thousands by delaying a shipment.
“I heard Tayvis came to visit last night,” she whispered.
“I sent him away,” I answered.
“Dace, you’re being stupid.”
The judge slammed his gavel. He glared at us. We shut up. Jasyn gave me a look that promised lots of talking later.
Leon proved his worth. He took apart witnesses twice as fast as the prosecution had built them up. By the end of the day, we looked like mistreated, misunderstood victims ourselves.
After the judge dismissed everyone, Leon beamed. “Told you I was good.”
“You’re incredible,” Jasyn said warmly.
Leon blushed scarlet.
He finished his defense by lunch the next day. The judge called a recess, with sentencing to follow. Lady Rina nodded as the guards escorted us from the room. “Did Lady Rina visit you last night?” Jasyn asked when we were seated in the tiny room with rubber sandwiches.
I shook my head. “No. Did she talk to you?” I asked Jerimon.
Jerimon twitched nervously. “A bit.”
“Not those stupid cards again.” I groaned.
“Focus, people.” Leon slapped the table. “You have to look very contrite, very apologetic. And look like victims. I heard Judge Smidely was actually sympathetic.”
“Lady Rina got to him, too,” I muttered.
“We will, Leon.” Jasyn winked.
Leon blushed red as he bit into his su-cheese sandwich.
“What did Tayvis say?” Jasyn asked, turning to me.
“Nothing,” I said flatly.
“I doubt that.”
“It’s none of your business.” I bit into the sandwich, then wished I’d taken out the su-cheese first.
“You’re making a big mistake, Dace.”
“He’s Patrol, Jasyn. Getting involved in the first place was my mistake.”
The guards fetched us much too soon. We walked back into the courtroom, standing behind the table in our matching green shipsuits. The judge took his seat. Silence spread through the crowded room like oil on water.
Judge Smidely frowned sternly.
“Jerimon Pai, you are guilty of stealing a religious artifact. You are also guilty of disruption of traffic and trade and trespassing. Fines are set at fifteen-thousand credits. You are hereby sentenced to no less than two years, no more than seven, at menial labor under the Patrol’s direction.” His gavel hit the podium.
“Dace,” he paused as if looking for a last name. “Charges involving piracy and smuggling for Belliff are dropped. You are guilty of nothing more than stupidity. However, your actions caused a significant amount of disruption. Fines are set at twenty-three-thousand credits.” His gavel crashed again.
“Jasyn Pai. You are most guilty of being an accessory. Fines are set at eleven-thousand credits.”
His gavel hit the podium a last time. A ripple of talk spread through the room. The guard stepped forward, cuffs at the ready.
“Dace, wait for me.” Jerimon swept me in his arms and kissed me, thoroughly. I was too astonished to do anything but let him. He set me back on my feet.
The guard interrupted, pushing between us. I stepped away, suddenly confused.
“We’re free, Dace.” Jasyn smiled, and ignoring her brother’s theatrics. Behind her, the guard led him out of the room.
“We still have forty-eight-thousand credits to come up with or they’ll still stick us in jail somewhere,” I said, still in shock that I wasn’t being hauled away to prison with Jerimon.
Jasyn reached into the front of her shipsuit, retrieving three perfect skystones. She set them on the table. “These should cover the fines. Even Jerimon’s.”
“With money to spare.” Leon reverently touched one stone with the very tip of a finger. “Where did you get these?”
“Trade goods,” I said promptly, jumping at the chance of freedom Jasyn offered. She’d had the sense to take the skystones off the altar. I should have thought of it but I was too preoccupied with the Eggstone.
“Find us a good buyer, Leon,” Jasyn said.
“I will,” Leon said, barely breathing as he stared at the fortune on the table. “I will.”
“And, Leon? See what you can do about Jerimon, please.”
Leon patted her hand sympathetically, his eyes still glued on the gemstones. “Not much I can do with the Patrol, sweetheart. But I’ll see if they’ll give him a softer sentence.”
“Scrubbing toilets on a troop transport? That can’t be too difficult. At least the Patrol will feed him regularly.” I stroked one stone, remembering the voice in my head. Was it really over? Were we really going to walk out the door? I almost expected Lowell to show up, telling me it was all a joke unless I joined the Patrol.
Jasyn brushed her black hair over her shoulder. “I need some therapy after all that. Shall we go shopping, Dace? I’ve got two more of those stones.”
“For what?” I couldn’t figure out how she’d managed to smuggle the skystones without me noticing. But then, I hadn’t been paying much attention.
“A ship. Partners?” She held her hand out to me.
I only hesitated a moment before clutching it in my own. She meant what she’d offered and I’d be stupid to refuse. “Partners.” I ignored the hole where Tayvis had been. Maybe in the future. No, no maybes. I didn’t want to open myself to that kind of pain. I smiled. “Which junkyard do you want to check first?”
“Who said we had to buy junk?” She stroked one of the skystones, her eyebrow cocked like Lady Rina.
Chapter Thirty-One
The room on Herifon was the same as before, a dusty box with battered furniture. The sun beat down, baking the weeds outside to desiccated sticks in the cracks of the ancient pavement. Th
e air conditioning labored without success to lower the temperature. Lowell waited, booted feet on the desk, silver eyes staring at the cloudless sky.
The door creaked. Tayvis walked in, face set.
“The trial’s over then?” Lowell shifted his gaze from the window to the other man’s face.
“I didn’t wait to hear the verdict,” Tayvis said, his voice flat, hollow.
“Ah.” The single sound hid layers of deeper meaning.
Tayvis dropped a single sheet of paper on the desk.
“What’s this?” Lowell twitched his feet to the side.
“My resignation.” Tayvis moved to the window, staring at the expanse of weedy plascrete.
“You can’t resign,” Lowell objected. “The Patrol owns you—”
“For another two years, seven months, and eight days.” Tayvis turned to face his commander. “I’m resigning from the Enforcers. And you.”
“I’ll bust you clear back to Ensign, third class.” Lowell spoke the threat in the same mild voice.
Tayvis reached for the sector commander clusters on his collar.
“Think about it, Tayvis,” Lowell said, his voice sharpening.
Tayvis yanked them free, dropping them on the desk. “I have.”
“What if I refuse? I could claim you aren’t in your right mind; put you on leave for emotional distress.”
“Then I’ll turn in another resignation after I’m certified sane.” Tayvis towered over the shorter, seated man. “Bust me back. Assign me to Planetary Survey or Peacekeeping. I don’t care. The price of working for you is too high. You cost me the one thing I wasn’t willing to lose.”
“Dace.” Lowell pushed the clusters towards Tayvis. “I’m sorry, Tayvis. Take them back. I’ll send someone else to tail her.”
“No.”
“Be reasonable.”
“The price is too high, Lowell. I’m not going to lose the small chance I may still have. I resign, Lowell.”
Lowell gathered up the paper and insignia. “So be it, Ensign Tayvis. Report for your new assignment tomorrow morning.” He stood, shoving the chair across the floor with one foot. “Unless you think it over and change your mind.”
Tayvis shook his head.
Lowell left him in the dusty room, staring at the dead weeds and brooding. Dace wasn’t a priority, not anymore. Events had passed over his opportunity. Other situations claimed his attention. In a month or two, maybe Tayvis would be ready to listen. He absently dropped the insignia pins in his pocket.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“She’s a beauty,” I whispered, hoping the salesman didn’t have enhanced hearing.
“This?” Jasyn waved a hand at the battered couch and scarred table, the only furniture in the ship. The walls were bare metal with wires hanging from access panels.
“The lines are good, the engine is solid. Well, it will be with a bit of work.”
“It’s a six-person ship!”
The salesman watched, his ears stretching to hear our conversation.
“We can fly it with two.” I scratched my neck, hiding my face from the salesman. “We’ll probably have to have another pilot to be legal. But it’s perfect, Jasyn.”
“It’s a wreck. I’ve had enough of junkyards, Dace. Let’s shop at a real shipyard.” She marched out of the hatch.
The salesman’s face wrinkled when I followed. We must have been his only customers for months, to judge by the rust and dust on his broken down ships. Most of them should have been sold as scrap, but this ship really did have potential.
I caught her at the bottom of the ramp. She turned, staring past me at the curved side of the ship, hands on hips.
“You really think this is worth what he’s asking? It’s more than twice what we have left.”
“This is more ship than we’ll ever get from a real shipyard. They won’t be willing to deal with us like Fred.” I nodded at the now very worried salesman standing in the hatch. “The most we could hope for is a very used courier. I don’t want to try flying an oversized tin can again. There isn’t enough room for a decent cargo. This ship could fly, with a bit of work.”
“A lot of work.” I almost had her convinced.
“I’ll do the engines, you do the cabins and lounge.”
“Are you sure you know enough?”
“Caid offered to help us.” Lady Rina’s engineer had been more than happy to offer. Lady Rina planned to stay planetside on Tebros for quite a while. “Caid looked it over yesterday.”
“You set this up, didn’t you?”
“I’ve looked at every used ship on the planet. This is the best deal.” I stepped off the ramp, hooking my fingers into the belt of my shipsuit. Leon added the cost of them to his bill, which was incredibly small considering what he’d pulled off. The suit flattered me. It was stunning on Jasyn.
“He’s asking way too much.”
“We’ll talk him down.” I sauntered towards the gate.
“So we pretend we don’t like it and we’re leaving,” Jasyn said.
“I give him another twenty feet, he’ll stop us before we get to the gate.”
He did. I talked him into dropping his price by thirty percent. I would have gone lower but he said we could leave it on his lot until we had the refitting completed, rent free. He also said we could use his tools, for a very modest fee. It took three hours to finalize the deal.
We went to a restaurant to celebrate. Not a fancy one, but one much better than most I’d ever been able to afford. Enough other spacers frequented the business that we didn’t attract too many looks, or at least I didn’t. Every male humanoid in the place looked at least a few times at Jasyn. She ignored them.
“What are we going to name it?” Jasyn asked over the appetizer.
“Do you have any suggestions?”
She shrugged. We ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Did you try to contact Tayvis?” she asked.
I put my fork down very carefully. I hadn’t expected that question or the pain it brought. “No,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.
“Dace, he cares about you, more than you realize.”
“I can’t trust anything he says.” I pushed the plate away, my appetite gone. “He was following us because Lowell told him to. He was trying to recruit me to go back to Tivor.”
“He was following orders, Dace. Don’t be stupid.”
“Stupid about what? I can’t trust him, Jasyn, not while he’s working for Lowell.”
The waiter took one look at our faces then swerved to a different table.
Jasyn looked down at her plate. “He talked about you, on Serrimonia. He tried to talk to you several times. The Eggstone gave him the creeps. It gave all of us the creeps. I saw it in your eyes, watching us, amused by us.”
“It wasn’t any better having it in my head.” I saw the ships outside on the landing field, waiting to lift. I wanted to be on one, flying away, flying free.
“So send Tayvis a message, Dace,” Jasyn said, picking through her salad.
“Why?”
“What can it hurt? You care about him, too. I see the way you look when you think I’m not watching. I’ve seen the picture of him you bribed Leon to get for you. The one you keep under your pillow.”
“You snooped in my things?”
“I saved it from going to the laundry.” Our landlady was overzealous keeping our room clean. But she was cheap, and only too happy to have sensible, quiet women instead of loud noisy men. She was the only person on Tebros who hadn’t watched our trial or she would never have thought that about us.
Our food arrived. I stared without really seeing it. I saw Tayvis, eating a kizzt eyeball and pretending to like it. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel his arms around me, his lips warm and soft on mine. I could also feel the hot tears that I’d thought I’d cried out in the middle of the night when no one could hear.
Jasyn reached across the table to touch my hand. “Blame Lowell, but not Tayvis. What
’s so bad about going back to Tivor anyway?”
“After fighting to be free of it? I won’t walk back into that cage voluntarily.”
“Tell me about it sometime.”
“Sometime, not today.”
She nodded.
“Have you ever been in love, Jasyn?” My voice came out small, timid. I met her deep violet eyes full of sympathy.
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“He found someone else,” she said, with just a trace of old bitterness. “He wasn’t worth it. Tayvis is, Dace.”
I picked at my food, fighting guilt for the way I’d treated him, for what I’d said. But I’d been the one betrayed, the one hurt.
“Don’t lose him, Dace,” Jasyn said, almost as if she’d read my thoughts.
I shook my head. I missed him, more than I wanted to admit even to myself.
“I’ve thought of a name for the ship.” She waited for me to quit picking apart my roll. “The Phoenix Rising.”
I dropped the crumbs of my roll onto my plate. “What’s a phoenix and why does it rise?”
“A mythical creature I heard about on Nevira. It’s a beautiful bird, no one could tell me what color, though. Red, gold, yellow, orange. It’s supposed to burn with its own light. And like a star, it explodes in flames when it dies. From the ashes rises a new phoenix, full of fire. It’s perfect.”
“Ugly duckling fits the ship better right now.”
“We could name it the Twinkle.” She managed to say it with a straight face.
I refused to even comment.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” She stirred through her food with her fork.
“No.” I’d been thinking about a name for the ship, but with my luck, it would be a jinx no matter what I chose. “You name it. Phoenix Rising is perfect.”
“It will work out, Dace,” she said, referring to Tayvis, not our recently purchased nonfunctional ship. “But only if you apologize. Or at least let him know you still care. Don’t let him go, Dace.”