by Ada Harper
“And there’s not a second staircase, a second exit?”
“Not unless you can fly.”
Without a word, they retreated into the warren of controls. The bank of the comms station and a stack of cargo hid them from immediate view from the entrance, but anyone doing even a cursory look over the place would discover them. Olivia strained to listen, counting the number of footfalls. When the steps turned louder, boots on metal instead of stone, all hope she had of avoiding an encounter fled.
“I have my gun, but an enclosed space, with these numbers...”
“I know.” Galen’s enormous frame sang with tension beside her. His hands clenched on themselves in absence of a weapon. “When they turn the corner, drop down. Use the cargo for cover. They’ll be more focused on me.”
Lady, preserve us all from the stupid heroics of handsome men. Olivia gripped his shoulder. The voluntary touch was enough to make him start. Muscles twitched under her palm as Galen blinked at her. Olivia measured the footfalls. They’d paused at the door.
“As if I’d let someone steal my hostage.” She had a spare second to savor Galen’s surprise. Her smile turned feral. She bolted to her feet and a muffled curse followed her out of cover, but Galen had enough sense to not barrel after her.
Olivia tore off her scarf and flung it over the grating. She had just enough time to see it satisfactorily catch on a steel outcrop before scuffed feet and raised voices brought her around. She met a thicket of battered rifles. Five mercenaries stilled in the room. They were dressed in sweat-stained gear of Syn-make, but their weapons all were handled with a crispness that said their owners should not be mistaken for anything but professionals.
“Drop to the ground,” the woman at the front barked. She looked like one of Galen’s vaunted wolves, if the wolf in question had been shaved, beaten, and reassembled with fishing wire. A puckered scar curved over her shaved head. The way the barrel-chested ape next to her flinched identified her as the leader.
“Ho, there. Didn’t know there was anyone else around these parts.” Olivia smiled, cupping her hands precisely away from her pistol.
“She don’t look Imp.” The hired gun’s voice sent a chill down Olivia’s spine. She knew that burr—the Syndicate hired gun who’d run into the rebel patrol. But the chances of running into the same mercenaries so far apart were impossible.
Unless she and Galen were the target of their hunt.
“Damn straight I’m not Empire. Do I look like I kiss dogs?” Olivia forced her voice to sprawl back into Syndicate drawl, all prefab futures and neon gutters. “But you lot. Don’t tell me the chit’s gone public now?”
“Chit?” another man murmured.
The leader only nosed her gun up, unimpressed. “I said drop the peashooter, woman. I won’t say it again.”
“Right, right. Don’t need to yell.” Olivia made a show of unslinging her rifle down one arm. She let it hit the grating with a clumsy clang. Her pistol followed. She waited until they relaxed a hair before unfurling her bluff. “Just as well, I guess. This bitch has been more trouble than the reward is worth.”
Right on cue, Olivia tracked the way the word reward fizzed across their faces. Good. Proper mercenaries then. The leader woman was least moved, but her eyes narrowed, pulling her scar into a hostile crescent. “Bitch? You’re not here after the traitor then.”
“Traitor? For...?” Olivia cast a flummoxed look around, as if just noticing the tower equipment. “Oh, shit. Is this a military install? Look, front door was unlocked. Figured it was worth a check.” She fluttered her hand over her shoulder, briefly wishing her filthy nails were as manicured as the gesture called for. “Runaway caricae. Syndicate bounty. Been checking every gods-forsaken bolt-hole and spider pit between here and the border.”
Something slackened in the leader’s face at that, and Olivia could positively smell the covetous plots from across the room. Noncompliant caricaes were two things in the Syndicate: sex and money. The disgust in Olivia’s stomach turned septic.
She kept her face bored, however. “Teenager, failed to show up for processing in North Kyanto. Was supposed to be a day job rounding her up from mommy and daddy’s but damned if the little thing ain’t a runner. Been chasing her for days. Cheeky bitch was tracked at a border checkpoint two days ago so here I am.” Olivia huffed. “No six hundred twill is worth this.”
Lust ripened to full-on greed. “Six hundred twill to bring a lost caricae in?”
“Yup, but only alive. Dead’ll net you half that. You know how these things are.”
“Lady’s tits, they ain’t offering half of that for the traitor,” one of the bearded mercs muttered before the woman with the scar hushed him.
Olivia shrugged and rubbed an imaginary cramp out of her thigh. Resettling her feet allowed her to edge toward the door, back to the platform. “Look, it’s yours if you want it. I am out of bug spray, I feel gross, and you know she’s gonna be a sobby shit when I get ’er. Caricaes are too much damn trouble.” She flicked a finger toward the platform. If she could get them to focus on the terminal, Galen could slip out the door after her before they looked too closely at the cargo stacks. “She’s got a trail up here, so I figure she mighta smuggled on a shuttle. I haven’t managed to get into the logs yet. If you got into that terminal—”
“Timbo, that true?” the merc leader barked at the tallest grunt in the group. A rangy, leathery sort with powder blue eyes. He lifted his head and sniffed. His head veered in her direction and Olivia’s heart nearly stopped before his gaze continued on to the platform, over the edge she’d tossed her scarf. “Yeah, something sweet went yonder that way.”
A tracker. The mercs had an altus tracker. Some altusii had a heightened sense for smells and took special training in the Syndicate. Rumor was the Whispers even had two on staff. A trained tracker could pick up a caricae’s or altus’s pheromones from ten yards, if the conditions were right. She’d never met a merc crew that could afford them, but she supposed that made sense, if they were hunting an altus like Galen.
Olivia silently thanked every known deity that she wasn’t in an enclosed space, with only recirculating air between her and Timbo. The open air of the shuttle platform wouldn’t immediately give her away, but it was only a matter of time. She had to get out of here. Olivia gave a chipper salute, “Well, kids. Good huntin’.”
The mercs gave her a cursory nod, and Olivia backed again toward the door. Nearly to the stairs. She could clear the tower, rejoin up with Galen a safe distance away. They needed to be in the trees before this crew realized no shuttle had visited this tower in ages and their runaway caricae was a tangled, sweat-stained scarf—
A click hammered her heart into her throat. The mercenaries weren’t looking at the terminal anymore. The leader had a lazy smile as she held up her rifle, but that click hadn’t come from her. Very, very slowly, Olivia inclined her chin to make out the impression of a rifle nose tucked at her ear. There’d been another one in the stairwell. Blue hell.
“We got a tracker on board, and you think we’ll be that dumb?” The leader leered her stiletto smile. “Now, were you lyin’ about that six hundred twill?”
Who knew what the Syndicate would pay for a runaway caricae teenager. Olivia had a good idea what the Syn would pay for a noncompliant caricae woman, however. More important, what they would do to one.
Her hand flew to her side, but she’d already dropped her weapon. It lay on the grate three feet away. She couldn’t reach it without getting shot.
The leader’s smile was ghastly. “Not talkative anymore, eh? Guess we’ll find out. Timbo, take her. If she gives you any problems, scruff her hard.”
Scruff her. Olivia suddenly didn’t care a whit about the gun at her back. She twisted away from the stairwell and stumbled back from the altus tracker. Bile rose in her throat and ate away her words.
A caricae is born to
be touched. It was one of the grosser slogans of the Syndicate health program, backed up by grosser science. Their ancestors, the survivors of the Crisis, had been thorough when they’d rejiggered their genes. Desperate to ensure the survival of their species, their scientists had borrowed many traits from other surviving mammals. Increased senses and personal pheromone.
And the scruff.
The back of a caricae’s neck was sensitive. More than sensitive. A gentle touch could be pleasant. After a hard day, Olivia sometimes worked a careful palm down her neck and it felt like an instant full body massage. Stimulation flooded her mind with soothing signals, a delicate, pleasant relaxation. Perhaps it was an old genetic marker, unfortunate but unintended. Or perhaps it had been intended as a pleasurable thing. A sweet, bonding act between trusted partners and loved ones. A defense against the stress of a near-apocalyptic event. Or perhaps the survivors of the Crisis simply were so driven to expand they didn’t care about clear consent.
Whatever the case, the ancestors who engineered her genes were long dead, but they continued to find all new ways of fucking Olivia over.
Because if a gentle touch was relaxing, a hard touch was debilitating. A harsh grip along those nerves would send a caricae boneless. Olivia had never been grabbed—she wore too many layers of clothing and armor to risk it—but she’d seen a caricae scruffed. She’d happened on a street once, when a transport had arrived at the next door caricae facility and the gurney they were using to transport a teenage girl had malfunctioned. The girl had been calm and compliant, agreeably waiting in the truck while the technicians cussed at the device. But that hadn’t kept them from deciding there was a faster solution. They’d grabbed her by the nape. She’d let out a startled sound, almost a mewl, then sagged. The technicians had joked about overtime as they dragged her, half-dazed and unaware, through the gate.
Olivia had decided there on the sidewalk, seething with inaction and self-loathing, that there were some things one could live through, but not survive.
She would not be scruffed.
She kept her face flat even as her pulse ricocheted in her throat. Every muscle in her body strained for a sense of control. The mercenary in the stairwell kept his gun leveled at her chest. The tracker took a step toward her. She took a step back. “Touching me would be a mistake.”
His smile was grotesque, showing every silver-capped tooth. “How do you figure that?”
“Because I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth first.”
“You say that now.” Another step. Olivia’s back hit the platform railing. Her neck felt exposed, scarf gone, hair buffered by the wind at her back. “But I think in a minute we’re gonna be best friends. Now be a good girl and tell me your name.”
Olivia had been many things, but never a good girl. So the expletives she unleashed in response were clearly enunciated, extensive in both depth, detail, and feeling. She would have had a moment to savor the fury that blanched the tracker’s face, if the platform hadn’t chosen that moment to explode into chaos.
The wall of crates stacked near the terminal came down in an avalanche, knocking down several of the mercenaries and drawing the rest’s attention. But instead of revealing an attacker, a burst of rifle fire burst from the opposite corner, and the platform descended into anarchy.
Galen. Olivia knew it without looking. Knew it like she knew gravity as she threw herself to the floor. Trusted it like the way her hand instinctively grabbed for her dropped pistol. Felt it like the whisper on her neck that spun her around. Her first shot was messy, and did not quite drop the mercenary in the stairwell.
An inhuman sound brought her attention around, giving her just enough time to correct and pull a disabling shot off. By then Timbo had wisely decided that a rampaging altus was more of a threat than an unarmed caricae and was locked in a grapple. Timbo was faster, twisting his arms around to try to claw Galen’s face, but Galen had the reach. He caught the mercenary’s wrist in a vise grip and brought up a knife in his other hand that he must have acquired earlier in the struggle.
He launched into a finishing move just as another figure, dark and lurching came up behind him. Olivia barely had time to gasp a warning, but Galen responded anyway. He swerved inhumanely fast, kicking away Timbo as he spun, knife up, to face the second assailant.
Timbo might have capitalized on that. Might have, if Olivia didn’t already have her gun up. Her third shot hit him in the neck and the mercenary dropped wordlessly. It wasn’t her teeth, but Olivia decided it would do. She didn’t wait to see if the tracker would rise. She spun back to Galen.
There was no target for her fourth shot.
The platform was a scramble of bodies. Galen straightened from a half crouch, chest heaving. He didn’t have a spot of blood on him. A fist still tight around the knife wedged deep in the second mercenary’s chest. Olivia rolled uncertainly to her feet and got a proper look. It was the leader woman, horrible smile turned rictus in death.
Olivia took a ragged breath and the noise drew Galen’s gaze. His brown eyes were clouded, darkened to a storm cloud of black-bronze. They trailed over her, searching foot to head for injuries, pausing at her exposed throat. A satisfied look cleared his gaze. His movements eased as he straightened silently, waiting.
“You...” Olivia pursed her lips and paused until she could be certain her voice didn’t shake. “That was a clever distraction.”
“You do keep telling me to use my brains.” Galen’s face was grim.
“You could have just let them carry me off.”
“They were looking for a traitor. You could have just handed me over.”
“Yeah, well...” Olivia chewed on that and shrugged. “I’m fickle.”
Galen huffed a laugh. He moved and began picking weapons out of the disarray behind them. “The cargo took one, you had two, that only left me two to deal with.”
“Only,” Olivia’s lip curled until she paused. She counted the bodies. Five scattered amid the fallen cargo, including Timbo. The slumped form she’d shot in the shadow of the stairwell. “But there were five earlier. Plus the man in the stairwell would make six...” An absence dawned on her slowly—No. “Galen!”
Galen twisted, his quick mind immediately followed the horror on her face and he turned to search the platform, but it was already too late. The red landing light strobed over Olivia’s head. A speaker beeped. It was all the warning Olivia got to fling a hand out before the grating beneath her feet fell away.
Olivia’s hand clamped around the railing, though that did little good as the railing was headed in the same downward direction as the rest of her. When the platform finished its folding arc, she only managed to hold on long enough for the force to slam her brutally against the side of the grating. Then her grip spun away and she was falling.
For a soul-juddering moment Olivia felt the rush, only aware of the savage green and blue spinning around her. Then the gray of the tower smeared past her eye. Something hard fled across her fingertips and the primal part of her brain spasmed to grab it.
A strut. Olivia held on hard. The stop felt determined to tear her arm out of her socket. Ragged metal bit into her skin. An edge, hot and unforgiving, carved pain up her side, pulling a shriek out of her, but she kept her grip. When she opened her eyes, she barely managed to fling a hand up to keep her face from slamming into a scaffold.
She should have known better than to look down. The first mistake was always looking down. Debris danced past her feet to plummet into the trees and the grasping tendrils of mist below. Wind whipped her hair but there was no air in her lungs. Panic clipped off any thoughts in her head.
“Olivia. Liv. Hold still.”
Galen’s voice was coaxing, calm in a way that cut through her. Olivia looked up and saw she’d fallen a good five meters down the bottom edge of the folded platform before catching a strut of the tower. Easily a full twelve meters from the
top. Galen levered his heavy frame over the edge, large booted feet barely finding purchase on the steel.
Olivia’s nerves gutted as his boot toe slid. “You’ll fall!”
“I won’t.” Galen didn’t stop his progress. “Neither will you.”
“Don’t be an idiot, just find a rope and I can pull—” Olivia’s heart stopped. Adrenaline had blotted out every thought but falling, but her body finally reported the feel of something liquid and cooling trickling down her arm. A metal edge had torn a gash of skin from her forearm. Blood poured freely and wicked into her elbow.
Blood. A scent so full of pheromone that even a deaf and dumb altus would smell. No. They’d been so close. After everything they’d—Her sight blurred with a threatening panic. Olivia gave herself over to it. “Don’t!”
Galen twisted around. “What—” His eyes followed hers to her bleeding arm and his face stilled. “Olivia—”
“Just stay fucking back!” Her voice sounded feral even to herself. Her arm screamed as she churned her feet against the scaffold. The metal was spaced too far to find easy purchase. Sweat slicked her grip, making it slippery. Her stomach cramped with terror. “Leave! Just...leave.”
Galen had become part of the tower, like one of the steel wolf heads, not moving, though his face was twisted with emotion. “I can’t do that.” He kept his voice soft and low, gentling. As you’d talk to a spooked mount or small child. Olivia could barely hear him over the shuddering drum of her pulse. “Olivia, listen to me. Stay calm, we’ll get to the top again and—”
He’d reached out a hand and her mind flashed a warning. The reach of the Syn technician, lazy and sure. The wilted sound the girl made as she hit the ground. Olivia nearly lost her grip again, surging away from it. She risked a one-handed hold to fumble for her sidearm. Her whole arm trembled when she raised it. Sweat swayed in her grip. Tears clotted her aim. “Stay back, Galen. I mean it. I don’t—this wasn’t—but if you come closer—”
“—I’ll know you’re caricae?” Galen said calmly. Olivia’s mouth dropped open. Galen readjusted his grip to catch and hold her stunned gaze. He made no attempt to reach her. “I’ve known that for days.”