by Lea Linnett
Kormak looked up at her blankly.
“My name is Terrina,” she spat. “My sister was on the crew sent to eliminate you.”
Kormak didn’t allow his reaction to slip onto his face, partly because he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Pity that her sister had been fooled as much as he had? Shame that he was probably the one that ended her life? Empathy, for a girl who’d lost her family?
Instead, he set his mouth into a firm line, and kept his eyes on the xylidian girl.
She glared, her long face twisting. “It wasn’t enough that you had to slaughter my sister,” she snarled. “We know you squealed on Malcolm while you were in prison—it couldn’t be anyone else. You didn’t escape at all, did you? This was all a deal set up with that Kerfaan father of yours. You traded Malcolm’s location for a backdoor ride out of Kharon!”
Kormak’s eyes narrowed. Information about his parentage wasn’t something he bandied about. She must have heard it from one of Malcolm’s inner circle—or Malcolm himself. Things really had changed since he left.
He sighed deeply, his head aching. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid. If my father had anything to do with my escape, he didn’t tell me about it.” It was always possible that he’d weakened the enforcer presence, but Kormak wouldn’t let himself believe it. “And you’re really naive if you think I’m the only person Malcolm’s pissed off.” He looked up at her. “He’s not here, is he?”
She paused, her glossy brow furrowing. “What?”
“I came here to kill him. What happened?”
She leaned back, crossing her stiff arms. “Enforcers stormed this place a few weeks ago. Took Malcolm, his inner circle, and anyone else they could fit in the transports. They didn’t find that though,” she added, nodding at the broken safe whose door was hanging by one hinge.
“Where is he now?”
Terrina smirked. “Kharon. He was sentenced just over a week ago.”
Kormak’s stomach turned to ice, his eyes widening. No, he hadn’t heard right.
“Kharon?”
She flashed red teeth at him again, nodding silently.
Kormak’s head dropped, his vision trembling. They would have been wheeling Malcolm into Kharon within hours of Kormak and Lena’s escape. He’d been closer to killing him then than he had at any point in their trek across the continent. The irony felt like a cast-iron clasp around his heart, squeezing and squeezing until he thought he might explode.
All this time, all this effort, and it was all for nothing.
Terrina was watching him, and she began to pace. He barely heard her when she spoke, until she stamped her foot in front of him.
“Listen to me! I don’t believe you,” she sneered. “You’re playing dumb, but I know what you wanted. You snitched on Malcolm, and traveled back here, and I know exactly why!” She pointed one clawed, pitch-black finger at the safe. “You wanted that. You wanted him out of the way so you could steal from him. No one else knew that safe was there, but you came in and opened it up like it was the easiest thing in the world.”
She grabbed his head with a hand, hooking her claws beneath the plates and tugging him up to face her. “This is all your fault, and you’re going to fucking pay for it.”
She stepped back then, and signaled for someone to step forward. It was an ashy, blue cicarian with a young face. He was wielding a large metal pipe, and he swung it back and forth in front of Kormak, his expression full of angry promise.
Kormak knew then that there’d be no reasoning with them. They were hurt, and they wanted to offload that hurt on someone else. They wouldn’t rest until they’d avenged whatever wrong they thought had been done to them. They were as unreachable as Kormak had been, and for the first time he felt shame rock through him.
The cicarian kid swung back, gaining momentum, and sank the metal into Kormak’s stomach. He doubled over, his breath leaving him, and grunted with pain.
He’d been unreachable. Single-mindedly focused on killing Malcolm, and now that he couldn’t, he really did have nothing. These children would rip him apart, just like he’d expected Malcolm’s bodyguards to do, but he would have none of the satisfaction of having wrung Malcolm’s neck. Suddenly, he wondered if that would have been enough anyway.
This was it. The culmination of his self-destruction. And Lena had tried so hard to stop it.
Another smack of the pipe, against his back this time. He was sure it was supposed to hurt, but Kormak’s body felt cold, as if he wasn’t really present in it anymore. When was the last time he’d felt alive—warm?
Lena…
He’d hurt her so badly—more than any bruised wrist or tender abdomen.
He’d rationalized that he was protecting her, but really he was just protecting himself. He’d thought he was unworthy of being cared for—he still did to an extent. But Lena had been so open with him, from day one. She’d reached beneath his shell and drawn him out, and it scared him. He hadn’t been that vulnerable since… Since Malcolm. Since his father.
He’d been too scared to accept her love—because it was love, wasn’t it? Or at least the beginnings of it. He was scared because, if she could love him, then maybe he wasn’t so monstrous, despite his actions. Maybe he didn’t need to end it.
Maybe there was another life for him.
The next hit was weaker, as if the cicarian was frightened he’d gone too far already.
Lena had tried to put on a brave face, but he’d seen the sadness in her when he left her on that street corner. She’d still wanted him to change his mind.
He didn’t deserve her. He doubted he ever would. But if he went to her, would she accept him even now?
The kid raised the pipe again, lining up a shot aimed straight at Kormak’s temple. He watched it come down in slow motion, whistling as it sliced through the air toward him.
And all of a sudden, Kormak didn’t want to die. He ducked to the side, putting his arm in the metal pipe’s path, and though he howled at the pain of his arm breaking, at least it wasn’t his skull. The cicarian pulled back, stunned, and that gave Kormak time to wrench against his restraints. The rope was old, and the piece around his left wrist snapped clean in two when he fought against it. He spun, gouging the wood of the desk’s leg away just as he had the desktop earlier, and pulled his other arm free.
Terrina’s crew all stepped back as he rose to his full height, his chest heaving. Every movement sent lances of pain through his limbs, but he pushed through it, towering over the much smaller aliens.
Terrina’s mouth was open in shock, but behind her someone dashed forward. It was a pindar wielding a knife, and the battle-cry he let out as he flew towards Kormak was unmistakable.
These people would fight him with everything they had.
And Kormak didn’t want to kill them.
So he ducked low, knocking the pindar off-balance and letting him roll away mostly unscathed. The cicarian, face strained with fear, stepped forward, brandishing his metal pipe. Kormak stepped towards him in one long lunge, ripping the pipe from his fingers and hitting him once, hard in the chest.
The cicarian fell back, winded, but Terrina was stepping up in his place, her face determined. He dodged one hit, and another, and then grabbed her arm, twisting it behind her and squeezing his hand around her carapaced wrist. “Leave now,” he murmured, loud enough for those closest to hear.
Terrina gasped, still trying to yank her arms from his grip. He shook her. “Leave now!” he repeated, louder this time. A few people standing in the back dropped their weapons, bolting out the door without a backward glance.
He dropped Terrina, and her legs went to jelly. He survey the small crowd still standing before him, taking in the fearful expressions that shined up at him in the lamplight.
Wordlessly, he turned away, crossing over to the safe. He pulled out the credit drive, glancing back at the children to find that another third of them had exited, including the cicarian with the pipe.
; That left Terrina and a ragtag group of aliens all milling about her. She glared up at him, her red teeth bared. Kormak rose to his feet, the credit-drive still in hand, and threw it to her. It landed on the floor with a soft thud.
She stared at him for a few long seconds, dumbfounded, her large eyes flung wide. Cautiously, she picked up the drive, turning it over in her fingers. Kormak didn’t know if they’d be able to crack the code, but if they did, the funds inside should go some ways to absolving his part in their loved ones’ death.
Or so he hoped.
“Fuck you,” Terrina finally growled. She allowed her friends to help her to her feet, and sent Kormak one last glare before she turned and left. A couple of her crew lingered, their eyes locked on his, but the fight was draining from them. There were mutters and curses, and then Kormak was alone, his body screaming with pain.
Lena…
He blinked, a wave of exhaustion rolling through him. His head throbbed, his back and shoulders ached, and his legs felt like they might give out at any moment. He wouldn’t make it if he tried to go to her now.
So he crossed the room towards Malcolm’s old bedroom. There were locks on the door and windows, and Kormak latched all of them. With a long-suffering sigh, he flopped down on the mattress, vacated so recently that the sheets weren’t yet musty.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care that Malcolm had slept here, either, only that it was relatively comfortable and safe.
Sleep took him quickly, dreamless and impenetrable as it wrapped itself around him and pulled him down, down, down.
27
Lena sat at the kitchen table, watching the sunset shine through Augusta’s makeshift burlap curtains. The sun bathed the scratchy material in burning oranges and dark shadows, and Lena wished she could be outside to take it in. She’d gotten used to enjoying sunsets while she traveled with Kormak, whether they were filtered through trees or scorching across the desert.
But now she was trapped inside for fear of enforcers spotting her or being recognized by one of their less-friendly neighbors.
Still, it was better than hiding in the laundry chute.
Her heart had leaped into her throat when a knock sounded at the front door that morning.
She hadn’t been careful enough. She was going to get her family imprisoned, she thought, panic rising within her like bile as Ellie and Augusta’s faces fell.
But the two women had simply nodded to each other, and her sister had bundled Lena over to the laundry. Local police—not enforcers—checked in on them every morning before dawn, she explained. They had done ever since Lena’s escape. But it was only a formality, a rudimentary check of each room and any obviously suspect corners. Apparently, the laundry chute wasn’t ever on the list. It was too small for many species to even think of hiding inside, and so commonplace that people forgot it was there.
It had taken some contortion to crawl up there, and her muscles strained, the metal chute dragging painfully at her skin. But soon the voices in the front room petered out, and the slam of the front door told her the officers had finally left.
She didn’t allow herself to flop down into the laundry pile until Ellie came to fetch her.
“It was the cicarian this time,” Ellie had said with an eye-roll. “He’s always too busy gawking at me to check anything properly.”
With that debacle over, Ellie and Augusta had opened the store for the day, and that meant Lena was confined to the back rooms or upstairs. And she had to keep away from the windows.
Despite knowing how incompetent local police tended to be in Rockford, she didn’t dare test her boundaries. She wouldn’t be staying long, and the smaller the impression she made, the easier it would be to leave.
So there she sat, holding the slip of paper with Brando’s details on it in her hand. She turned it over in her hands, folding and unfolding it nervously.
Her heart still ached with Ellie’s rejection. Her sister had been her responsibility for almost a decade, her one constant in a life full of so many instabilities, and coming to grips with the loss was difficult.
She’d always suspected that they’d leave Augusta one day. The woman did care for them, and she’d helped them so much over the years, but her actions had always had the hard edge of survival to them. It was easier to survive when you had one boarder out making money and the other bringing customers into your shop.
But Ellie? The thought of parting with her sent Lena’s stomach into a series of twists and turns that she didn’t want to focus on too much lest she throw up.
She couldn’t stay here. Staying in New Chicago, where police checked in on her family every day and anyone on the street could recognize her and turn her in, was impossible. But with no home, and no sister to take with her, the possibilities of where she could go seemed completely, alarmingly endless.
She could go to another city. She’d still be looking over her shoulder, but at least things would be similar. There were wayhouses for the homeless in most large cities; even if she could only secure a bedroll in a corner, it would be enough until she found more factory work, right?
She could try leaving the country. There were other settlements on other continents, but getting there might be difficult.
She sighed, gazing down at the little slip of paper.
Could she do it? The idea of running away into space by herself still terrified her. It would be much safer to stick to Earth but… She knew her way around most machines, and what she didn’t know, she could learn. Surely she could barter passage on a few freighters that way. Especially with Brando’s help and fake identification.
But then there was the fact that she might never see Ellie again. There was no guarantee that she’d ever be able to come back to Earth. She’d be completely and utterly alone out there.
She knew she had to let her sister go, though. Ellie was right; they both had lives to live.
She bit her lip. If Kormak was still with her, this decision would be easier. He knew Brando; he knew space. He knew how to navigate the more unsavory parts of society no matter where they were. He’d be able to protect her from all of the unknowns that sent waves of worry through her gut.
She chuckled humorlessly, letting her head fall forward onto the table. She’d have punished herself for even considering him as her ‘protector’ only a week ago. Sure, she’d been ready to use him as a cover for her own escape, but she couldn’t kid herself—this was something different.
She missed him. She missed his silent presence, his unerring confidence. He wasn’t infallible—his tumble in the river and its immediate aftereffects made that clear—but when he couldn’t protect them, she found it so much easier to pick up the slack with him there. Looking after herself was a difficult, if necessary, challenge. Looking after Kormak, or Ellie? That was easy.
She missed being able to hang back for once, assured that when she looked up he’d still be there, walking two steps ahead of her. He was something solid that she could rely on, for a change.
And on top of all that, she missed his look of surprise when she hot-wired that car, his admiration as she built a fire, the pleased glint in his eye when she writhed just so beneath him.
She breathed in sharply, surprised.
She loved him, didn’t she?
That made her laugh for real, sitting back in her chair, but the sound was sad. How many times had she told herself she didn’t need anything like that—that she didn’t need romance? The love she’d had was for her family, and then her sister. It was one of caring, and it would always be enough to sustain her.
But it wasn’t anymore, was it? She’d had just a taste of that something more, and now she yearned to have it again.
“Goddammit,” she muttered, the Yumin Tok expletive falling from her lips.
She should have told him. She didn’t know if it would have changed Kormak’s mind, but there had to be something in the way he looked at her, the way his dangerous pupils went soft when he saw her. Even if it was hopeless
, she should have tried harder to reach him.
And now it was too late. They’d parted ways. She didn’t even know if he was still alive.
She visibly deflated, sinking down into her chair. No tears welled up in her eyes now. She felt flat and boneless, as if her body had given up on her. Despair pulled at her heart like molasses, squeezing the air from her lungs.
How could she have let him go?
Her gaze dropped down, unseeing, but after a few moments, the jagged edge of the paper slip still clutched in her hand swam into focus.
She grit her teeth. She couldn’t just sit here. Kormak might have given up on himself, but he never gave up on her. He’d given her a path, and she wouldn’t waste it. Couldn’t waste it.
She could do this. She could—
“Is that an enforcer?”
Ellie’s panicked hiss cut through Lena’s thoughts just as the front door chimed threateningly.
She shot up from her chair when Ellie gasped, hearing heavy footsteps and the thunk of something falling to the floor. She sidled up beside the kitchen door, but refrained from peeking around it. The front room wasn’t visible from her vantage point, and she would have to cross the hallway and hide herself in the laundry if she wanted to see, revealing herself in the process.
She strained her ears. Ellie and Augusta had fallen silent. All she could hear was the labored breathing of their visitor, intrusive and loud.
“Can we help you with anything?” Augusta finally asked in Levekk Trade, and Lena’s breath rattled nervously. For a few, pregnant seconds there was no reply…
And then the intruder huffed out a breath.
“I’m looking for…”
Lena’s heart rocketed up into her throat at the sound of the intruder’s voice. Her frozen feet kicked into action without her consciously thinking about it, and she flew out of the kitchen, coming to a standstill with three sets of eyes all trained on her. Augusta was holding a broom out before her as if to ward off danger, while Ellie stood with a hand to her mouth behind her.