He shrugs. “I built up calluses. By the time I started middle school, I could walk across hot asphalt without flinching.”
“How hot is asphalt?” I ask as I take another step forward, and more mud squelches around my feet.
I can tell from the silence behind me that Jai’s giving me that look again. The one that says he’s pretty sure he’s discovered an alien life-form, because no human woman would ask these kinds of questions. Instead of turning to see the look, I take another step forward, into the stream.
Water rushes over my feet, lapping at my ankles. I gasp and close my eyes. It’s colder than I thought it’d be. And I don’t know what I was expecting from the stream bed, but the mud here is grittier. It’s slimy in places and sprinkled with smooth rocks that poke the soles of my feet.
“Let me guess,” Jai says, and I open my eyes, surprised to find him standing less than a foot away, just out of the mud. “You’ve never walked in a stream before.”
“No.” I admit. Because surely that’s not so weird. Lots of people grow up in cities and will live their whole lives without ever seeing a stream. Or a patch of forest. Or—
“Where are you from, Rayla?” He leans down to take off his left shoe and sock, and his balance is flawless.
“Why?”
Jai shrugs and lowers his bare foot into the mud, then lifts the other one. “I’m curious.” He tosses his right shoe and sock onto the grass, then steps into the stream with me, up to his ankles. “I mean, you high-step through the forest like you think vines and roots are going to reach up and grab you. And you’ve clearly never walked on grass. Or mud. Or in water.”
“I’ve walked in water!” I insist, sloshing my way deeper into the stream. The current is stronger here, and it laps halfway up my shins. “And I know how to swim, in case you were going to accuse me of that next.”
“From swimming pools, right? And bathtubs. Or maybe some kind of fancy water fountain?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No. It’s just that every now and then you hear about these kids raised on long-distance freighters. They’ve never set foot on the ground. Any ground. I’m guessing that the first time they do, they look and sound like you have since the moment you got out of that shuttle.”
A long-distance freighter. Yeah, that would have been a good cover story.
“Is that what it was? You grew up on some massive ship, always moving? Like, a space yacht?”
“Something like that,” I mumble.
“And you never vacationed anywhere? Someplace with solid ground, I mean? Someplace with real gravity?”
I shake my head slowly, watching him bend over to roll his pants up. His calves are thick and covered with a light hair growth.
“Well then.” Jai steps closer, and the stream sloshes around the lower part of his shins. “I guess there are a lot of things you’ve never…felt.”
I look up to find him watching me with a heated smile, a devilish interest building in his grayish blue eyes. We’re obviously not talking about grass and mud anymore.
Shit. He did see me staring earlier, and now he thinks I’m interested.
Again, he’s not wrong. But I know better than to act on that interest. I’m not entirely stupid and reckless, despite what my presence on the surface of this planet might suggest.
“Yeah. I guess you could say this is all new to me.” I’m horrified to hear the flirtatious tone in my voice, despite my healthy, logical decision not to become physically involved with Jai-the-convict.
He steps closer. I hold my ground, and he takes another step. Now I can feel his body heat through both his shirt and mine, and it’s a tantalizing contrast to the cold water rushing over my feet. If I take too deep a breath, I’ll be pressed against him.
I take a deep breath.
Jai exhales. Slowly. “If I kiss you, are you going to slap me again?”
“Probably,” I breathe. My mouth opens a little, and his gaze snags on it. Then he leans in and kisses me, tugging my bottom lip between his. His hand glides along my jaw, tilting my head, taking me deeper and deeper into this kiss until when he pulls away, nipping my upper lip for just a second, I can hardly catch my breath.
“What was that for?” I resist the urge to lick my lips, to see if they still taste like him.
Jai grins, as if he can see that urge. “I wanted to kiss you. So I did.” He tilts his head just a little. “You didn’t slap me.”
“You sound disappointed.”
He shrugs. “You’ll get another chance.” Then he walks out of the stream, leaving me standing there alone with my feet in the water. Feeling like I should dunk the rest of me, just to cool down.
I am in way over my head.
4
JAI
“So, what exactly are we looking for out here?” Rayla asks as she stomps through the woods behind me, snapping into twigs and crunching over leaves.
“My turkey trap.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
I laugh with a glance at her over my shoulder. “It is now.”
“Well, if it wasn’t before…what’s a turkey trap?”
“It’s a dead-end ditch sloping into the ground. You sprinkle dried corn into it, hoping to trap a turkey.”
“That doesn’t sound like a real thing.”
“How would you know, freighter-girl? Do they have turkeys on cargo ships? Or long-range space yachts, or whatever kind of weird-ass vessel you grew up on?”
“Yes!” She moves a little faster to catch up with me. “But our turkeys come cooked, sliced, and served with a side of cranberry walnut salad.”
“Rich girls.” I sigh with mock exasperation. “I hope I’ve actually caught one, just so you can watch me pluck it.”
She snorts. “Again, that sounds like a euphemism.”
“Only because your mind is in the gutter. Which, for the record, is where I like it.”
“Down, boy,” Rayla scolds. She’s a lot less uptight since I kissed her, and I’m pretty sure she’d be downright pleasant if I could get her to relax just a little more. “This is just a quick detour, right?”
“It is a detour, but the duration will depend on what I find in my ditch.”
“Okay, I don’t want to sound ungrateful—”
“Then you should probably stop while you’re ahead.”
“—but we don’t have time for you to stand around and choke your turkey.”
That time I snort.
“Jai! It’s almost dark. We need to find somewhere to sleep.”
“There’s a building on the other side of this stretch of woods. It’s what’s left of a settlement no one wants to live in, because there’s no running water. We’ll sleep there. But first, we have to check my traps. A man has to eat. And I won’t be the only one ‘choking my turkey.’ You’ll be helping.”
Rayla’s footsteps go silent behind me, and I turn to see her frowning at me. “Okay, I have to admit, that sounds…adventurous, in a primitive hunter/gatherer kind of way. I mean, people pay to go camping, right? But why are you hunting turkey in the first place? They feed you guys here. I know that much.”
You guys? It’s like she hasn’t fully come to terms with the fact that she’s a convicted criminal, just like the rest of us. And she won’t, as long as she thinks there’s a shuttle coming to rescue her.
The more I think about that, the less I believe it’s going to happen. Even if there is another guard on her parents’ payroll, how is he going to know when to come for her? How is he going to find her? What is he going to do with her once they get to Station Alpha? Her story makes no sense. I’m not saying she’s delusional, but I do think that whatever guard signed on to be her backup plan probably took her money with no intention of actually following through with a stunt that would likely get him sentenced to life on this very planet, if he gets caught.
“There’s a supply drop in each zone, every week.” Rayla sounds like she’s reciting facts she read in a book. But at least she was paying
attention to part of the in-processing brief. “Two of them, in fact. Right?”
“Yes. Did they also tell you that the supply drop is a free-for-all, and that if you’re not strong enough to fight your way to the front before the food’s gone, you’re going to starve to death? Although, women usually have the option of bartering their bodies for food, if they can’t make it to the drop. If that’s what you’d like to do…” I shrug. Then I wink, when I realize she doesn’t know I’m joking.
“You’re an asshole.”
I don’t deny the charge.
“I have food,” she says. “I’d be happy to share, if that means we can just go ahead and find this building, so we won’t be stuck out here at night.”
I stop walking and look at her, unable to resist a grin. “Are you afraid of the dark? Because I assure you I’m the most dangerous thing out here, no matter what time of day it is.”
Her cheeks flush. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You’re not hungry, either. Right? You’re in no hurry to get off this planet. And you certainly don’t want me to kiss you again,” I say, letting my voice drop into a deep pitch that seems to make her…shiver. She frowns at me like I’ve lost my mind, and I shrug. “I figured if we’re going to play the lying game, I’d just go ahead and lay your cards out on the table, to save you the trouble.”
“I don’t…” Her voice cracks, so she licks her lips and starts over. “I don’t want to kiss you, Jai.”
“You are such a liar.”
“I’m not…” Her voice fades, and she lets that fib die in the air between us. “I’m just saying we don’t need to hunt for turkey right now. I have food.”
“They issue seven meal packets, right?” That’s how it was when I got here, anyway. “That’s enough for a few days, max. Less, for two people.”
She clutches her pack, and for a second, she looks like she’ll argue with me. Then she heaves a dramatic sigh and swings her bag onto her back again.
“It’s not that I’m out of food, Rayla. It’s that I don’t intend to be out of food. I’m planning ahead.” And I really want some fresh meat.
“Fine. Let’s go find your turkey.”
“You’ll thank me when you’re holding a roasted leg, dripping juice all over the place.” Or, maybe she won’t. She hasn’t been here long enough to go hungry yet, or to have to bargain for food. The turkey I’ve been craving—and learning to trap—for weeks probably means as little to her as the mud squished between her toes, back at the stream. Less, maybe.
She seemed to like the mud.
We continue hiking through the woods while I try to remember where, exactly, I dug my ditches, and to her credit, Rayla doesn’t complain, even when she trips over roots and gets smacked in the face by clumps of brush. Now that she’s no longer thirsty and I’ve assured her nothing out here is a danger to her—other than me—she seems content to pretend this is some kind of exotic camping vacation.
“So, how did you learn to make these turkey traps?” she asks, and when I realize she sounds a little out of breath, I turn to see that her face is flushed from the effort to keep up with me.
God, I would love to see how flushed the rest of her gets when—
“What? Do I have something on my face?” She runs both hands over her cheeks, then into her hair, and she’s looking at me with wide brown eyes that have probably never seen anything like what I’d like to do to her.
That kiss in the stream left her breathless. I wonder what she’d sound like if I kissed her…elsewhere.
“Just a little bit of dirt.” I wipe a smudge from her forehead, over her left eye, and when I step back her mouth is barely open. Like she’s waiting to be kissed.
And I think about it. But then I decide to let her want it a little longer.
“I found one,” I say as I hold a branch back for her.
“What?”
“I found a turkey trap. In the woods near Settlement A. One of the guys who used to live there—Tyson—was a hunter. One day he came into town with an honest-to-god turkey, plucked and drained. I had no idea how he caught it, but a couple of weeks later, after he was long gone, I found his trap in the woods. It was a little ditch sloping into the ground, with a trail of dried corn in it. Most of the corn was gone, and the ditch was empty. But there were these distinctive, three-toed turkey tracks leading into it.” I shrug. “It wasn’t hard to figure out how he caught the damn bird, and I’ve been trying ever since.”
“Wait, you mean you haven’t caught one yet?”
“Well, no,” I admit. “But I know how, so it’s really only a matter of time.”
Rayla laughs. “I know how nuclear propulsion works, too, but it would take me a hell of a lot of time to put that knowledge to use on my own.”
“Catching turkeys isn’t quite nuclear propulsion.”
“Yet you haven’t caught one.”
“You’re going to eat those words,” I warn her.
She laughs again. “Figuratively, of course, since you don’t have a turkey to feed me.”
“Oh, I’ve got something to feed you, princess.”
“Thanks, but I’m going to hold out for the promised turkey.” She gives me a smug grin, evidently nearly as confident that I can’t catch a bird as she was that I couldn’t fire the pilot’s gun. I really want to make her eat her words.
Unfortunately, half an hour later, as the sun sinks below the horizon, painting the forest floor crimson with light bleeding through the canopy, we find my turkey trap. And it is empty.
“The corn’s still here,” she notes, staring down into the hole from the deep end. “I guess we could eat that.”
It takes me a second to figure out she’s joking.
“Damn it. I was sure this one would work.” If I had more corn, I’d sprinkle some into the ditch, but until I find another packet of ChiliMac and can pick out and dry the kernels, I’m out of luck. “Fine. I guess it’s pre-packaged slop for dinner. If we hurry, we can get to that building before the temperature drops too drastically.”
“So, how did you dig the ditch?” Rayla asks as I lead her directly and quickly to the west, toward the setting sun. “Do you have a shovel?”
“Nope. Just a piece of metal that works more like a really rustic hand plane, shaving off layers of soil. If there were a shovel in zone four, it wouldn’t be used for digging ditches,” I tell her.
“Well, I assume it’d be used for burying people, when they die. But surely that doesn’t happen on a daily basis, or anything.”
“Rayla, if there were a shovel, it’d be used to kill people, not to bury them. Weapons are the most valuable thing on Rhodon, and corpses are among the least valuable. When people die, we drag them out to the pile about a mile from Settlement A and leave them to rot.”
“Well that seems…callous.”
“It’s practical. Rotting corpses breed disease. And it’s a real shame when they die on a perfectly good bed, because sometimes we have to get rid of the mattress too, and the weekly supply drop never includes mattresses.”
“Or shovels.”
“Or shovels,” I agree.
Rayla is just starting to shiver from the cold when we emerge from the woods. “Is that the building?” she asks, staring toward the west at a dark, squarish shape rising from the ground about half a mile away.
“Yeah.”
“You said it was part of a settlement? What happened to the rest of the buildings?”
“I have no idea. That’s been the only one standing since before I got here, but when we get closer, you’ll be able to see the ruins of three other buildings. They’re pretty much just piles of rubble now.”
Ten minutes later, I dig my flashlight from my bag to help us pick our way over debris scattered near the front of the building. Because the back door is rusted shut.
“Are you sure this is safe? It looks like it could fall down around us any second.”
“I think there used to be some kind of cover over this en
trance, and that’s what we’re stepping around right now. But the inside’s intact,” I assure her.
As near as I can tell, this building once held several offices. It’s two stories tall and has several suites of rooms, but there’s no need for us to explore any farther than what was once a lobby, in the dark.
“We’re in luck,” I say, as the beam of my flashlight finds the mattress in the corner. “I was afraid someone might have hauled that off. Or a raccoon might have chewed it up.”
“Wait, you’re talking about that filthy mattress? We’re lucky because that thing’s still here?”
“I assure you, it’s softer than the concrete floor.” If there was ever any carpet, it was stripped along with all of the furniture long ago.
“I’m sure that’s true, but it’s probably harboring enough germs to wipe out an entire terraforming colony.”
“You have antibiotics?” I ask, and she nods. “Then you’re all set. Come on.” But she looks like she’d rather stick her hand into a meat grinder. “Rayla, nothing’s clean here. They don’t issue vacuum cleaners and bleach. We wash our clothes in the sink, when there’s running water, and in a stream when there isn’t. We use soap and toothpaste when we have them, and we sleep on mattresses when we can find them.”
Finally, she nods, but the gesture looks a bit shaky.
I shrug and set my supply pack on a cracked countertop that was once a built-in receptionist’s desk. “Sleep on the floor if you want, but it’s just as dirty and much harder. These are the options, princess.”
“I know. And for a few nights, I’m sure it’s fine. I’m just trying to imagine living a lifetime like this…”
She still thinks she’s getting off this rock.
“You won’t have to imagine it.” My voice sounds harsher than I intended, but maybe she needs to hear that. She may have gotten sent here on purpose, but she can’t get off Rhodon just by waving a stick in the air and calling it a magic wand.
No matter what she thinks, Rayla isn’t going anywhere.
“Here. This might help.” I dig to the bottom of my pack and pull out a folded bedsheet. It’s the flat kind, without the elastic corners, but it’s still relatively clean and it’s big enough to hang over the edges of the single-person mattress. Which is going to be pretty difficult to get comfortable on, if Rayla keeps the no touching rule intact.
Dirty Lies Page 5