by H. E. Trent
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SUMMARY
Owen McGarry’s plan to isolate himself on planet Jekh in hopes of escaping survivor’s guilt about his identical twin’s death drastically backfires when the newest inhabitant of his sister’s farm proves she can’t be trusted with independence.
Raised in an alien lab and designed to be a “better” Jekhan hybrid, lonely Ais is actually nearly blind and can barely communicate. While her hostesses bend over backward to make Ais feel welcome, their brother Owen treats her like a petulant child who lacks common sense. After enduring a quarter century of experimentation on a cold Tyneali space station, Ais wants to feel useful and wanted, but Owen thinks what she needs is to be locked away for her own good.
Lust and affection bloom in close quarters when gutsy Ais shows she’s more than a problem for Owen to solve. His gruffness doesn’t deter her. She soothes his wounded spirit and can actually put a smile on his face, but love on Jekh is never simple. Ais is being hunted by three entities with competing agendas, and they won’t stop until they have her.
Owen didn’t move to Jekh to play hero, but if he doesn’t want to see true love slip away, he’ll have to quickly learn to be one.
CHAPTER ONE
2037—NEAR THE BESHNI FARM, PLANET JEKH
“Dammit.” Owen McGarry swung his dull machete through the dense foliage and vines near the base of the mountain. The path was overgrown after decades of neglect. Obviously, Ais—his quarry—hadn’t taken that route, but Owen was already so deep into the murk that retreating would have taken nearly as long as soldiering onward. If his recall of his brother-in-law Trigrian’s area map was correct, there should have been a clearing ahead.
Lightning streaked across the ominous, green-tinged sky, and Owen swore under his breath. According to Trigrian, the seasonal rains had been worse than typical in the farm country near the village of Little Gitano. Normally, Jekh’s fourth season—the peak of the agricultural year—was mild with the occasional heavy rainfall, but the Stele weather phenomenon altered the cycle every five or six years. Because of the disruption, there were numerous critical construction projects on hold at the Beshni farm. The ground was still sodden from the last big rain, and the sky hinted that even more precipitation lay in wait. Owen’s little sister Erin would be pissed. One of those halted construction projects was a house for her and her lovers.
He put his shoulder against a spindly, soft Jekhan tree and, grunting, pushed the trunk aside to squeeze through the thicket. Close to the mountain, the trees practically entwined and made passage that much more difficult. Difficult or not, he had no choice but to press on. He wasn’t playing a game of hide and seek. A foolish woman had gone off to explore the dangerous backcountry alone.
One of the residents of the farm his sister Courtney managed with her lovers had noticed that Ais was missing. Ais had missed lunch, which wasn’t atypical on the farm. Projects became engrossing. Small tasks that started at midday would morph into monsters that required taming until after supper. Owen generally didn’t notice much of anything. He secluded himself at his cottage, tinkering on one project or another so he could keep the communications equipment running. Getting information to Earth about what was happening on the failed colony of Jekh was his top priority. The Terrans never should have gone there. The Jekhans had quietly visited Earth twenty years prior, extended their hands to shake, and quickly had them bound. What the Terrans had done was the equivalent of a large-scale car jacking. He’d seen shit like that all the time in Boston before he’d pulled up stakes and moved to Montana. Some sweet idiot would drive into the wrong ’hood to proselytize or to gather signatures for a petition, and the aggrieved locals would take their wallet and their car.
Owen hadn’t intended to end up on Jekh as one of those “car jackers.” He was there because Courtney had taken a policing job in the city of Buinet. She’d meant to do some investigation about their then-missing grandfather but, Court being Court, she’d found some trouble. Owen and Erin followed, intending to bail Court out. A year later, and they were still on Jekh. Court and Erin had taken Jekhan lovers and chose to stay. Owen hadn’t left because he’d wanted solitude, and figured he’d find some on the sparsely populated alien planet.
He scoffed.
Should have stayed in Montana.
The ground shook and, soon after, more light branded the sky.
“Fuck.” Pausing to catch his bearings, he dropped the machete point-first into the soft ground, turned his wrist over, and then double-tapped the band of his portable COM device.
“Go ahead,” the buttery, computerized voice told him.
“Display location,” he responded.
“Unable to display. Incomplete maps.”
“Triangulate based on last recorded location.”
“Please wait.”
“Never mind.” He double-tapped again to put the COM back in standby, and then grabbed the knife. The last time his COM had told him, “Please wait,” the little computer had crashed twenty seconds later and he’d ended up having do a reboot in safe mode. He needed to upgrade the processor chip again, but hadn’t had time or the right materials. To get what the device required, he’d have to manufacture a chip from odds and ends, and he was too busy helping his little sisters play the Jekh Savior game.
So much for solitude.
He resumed his trudging through the trunks and vines as the sky threatened with increasing frequency.
“I wonder if I should head back to the farm,” he muttered, eying the sickly tinge of the clouds. He’d been hiking nearly three hours. Certainly, someone who’d taken a more direct route would have found Ais already if she were in the area. She always wore a bright white dress, in spite of the frequently dirty work she did on hands and knees. The color lured her, apparently. The local Jekhan doctor—Dorro—said she was the Earth equivalent of legally blind with severe color discernment problems as well, but that white was easy for her to see.
Her eyes could be fixed in time, but there was no way to surgically implant common sense.
The next crash of thunder came right at the heels of a lightning flash. Just like on Earth that meant the storm was getting closer.
“Too fucking close.” Electrocution wasn’t on his bucket list, so he dug deep into his inner well of energy, and picked up as much speed as he could.
Trigrian had said there was a stone path around the mountain base on the side nearest the farm, and he would have known. Court’s lover had been born on the farm. He knew every inch of the property and the bordering lands near the mountain, but no one had cleared those paths in the decades the property had sat vacant. Tr
igrian had moved to Buinet after his parents died, and then the Terrans invaded. He’d been home for less than two years.
“Finally.” Owen forced himself between two trees and planted his booted foot on the manmade trail. He could jog if he wanted to—could hurry toward that tiny splinter of sunlight and get his ass back to the farm before the sky opened up and drowned him where he stood. He was going to do that, but he heard the whimper.
He stopped.
Swallowed.
Listened.
Come on. Let me hear you again.
There were few large predators anywhere on Jekh. That was one of the reasons an alien race called the Tyneali had seeded their half-human hybrid experiments on the planet. Owen had become quite familiar with the wild beasts of Montana before his hasty relocation and had learned that just because a beast couldn’t easily eat him didn’t mean one wouldn’t want to try. Rabbit bites hurt like a bitch, and so did rabies shots.
Ais may have been reckless, but he wasn’t.
He heard another whimper, and the sound definitely wasn’t a growl or any other noise animals made to warn off other beasts. The breathy, pathetic sound belonged to a woman.
“Hello?” He tightened his grip around the handle of the machete and tipped his head toward where he’d thought the sound had come from. Northeastward would have been his guess, but the wind was picking up and making the orientation ambiguous. “Say something if you’re out there.”
“I…” There came a gasp, then a muffled, “P-please.”
“Ais.” Sighing, he surged ahead.
She sounded as though she were just around the jutting finger of rock. He’d recognize her voice anywhere, in spite of having only heard her speak a handful of times. Her voice was sweetly melodic, though always so halting, both from lack of English practice and likely some genetic defect of her throat. Like the Jekhan race, Ais was an experiment of the Tyneali. She was supposed to be the better hybrid version—more human, more durable, and without all the hormonal deficiencies of the others.
Except for her red eyes and flame-colored cheeks, she looked human enough. She didn’t act human, though. Everyone’s best guess was that she was yet another failed experiment. Failed or not, the people who’d made her still wanted her back. A scoundrel named Reg Devin had stolen her from a lab, and then his ship got stolen—with her inside—by a couple of human friends of the McGarrys who were working for the Jekhan Alliance. The city of Buinet’s police commissioner Lillian Devin—Reg’s mother—frequently monitored space communications from her office. Not only were the Tyneali making inquiries about retrieving Ais, but so were a few pirates looking to make a quick buck on the sex worker market. Lillian wasn’t trying to get Ais back for her son. She was doing everything she could to undo all the dirty deeds he and men like him had done on Jekh.
Like so many others, Ais was a refugee on the Beshni farm and, apparently, she was tangled into a vicious thorny vine just beneath a mountain ledge. Near the path, her woven basket rested on its side, spilling green and red berries onto the ground. She was ensnared about eight feet up the mountain’s face with her belly against the vines on the rock, and barely clinging to a fissure she’d stuffed her fingers into.
The thorns were holding her up, but she could let go. Even after a hard landing, she probably wouldn’t have broken anything. But if she let go, the thorns would dig into her flesh—her face, her belly, her legs.
She’d bleed, and a lot.
“Fuck,” Owen spat.
He ran to the rock, double-tapped his COM, and waited for the prompt. “Court? Erin?”
Without the trees dampening the signal, he should have been able to get a signal to the farm from there. His sisters had stayed at the main house to keep watch in case Ais had returned on her own.
“Did you find her?” came Court’s voice—always so deceptively calm. “Half the search party has already come back. She wasn’t on any of the paths. I even had Murki go ask around in Little Gitano.”
“Call everyone back,” Owen said through gritted teeth. “I found her.”
“P-please,” Ais whined. She writhed ineffectually, apparently trying to get one leg free of the thorny growths, but the long skirt of her dress was tangled up in the vines.
He inched closer, hacking away at the vines at the mountain base. Seeing that her long, black hair was tangled up in the mess, too, he forced air through his teeth. If she’d fallen while waiting for rescue, her hair would have been ripped from her scalp. She may have been stupid for climbing up onto that ledge in the first place, but not so stupid that she couldn’t predict what would happen next.
“Jesus,” he muttered, rubbing the month of growth of his beard.
“Owen, what’s happening?” Court asked.
“Looks like she was picking berries and stepped back off a ledge onto a narrower one. She’s okay, but she’s tangled up in some vines. I’m going to cut her down. See if you can send someone over with the truck or one of the flyers so I don’t have to carry her back. Took me three hours to hike out here.”
“Shit. We’ve got to get her eyes fixed. Got coordinates for me?”
“I’ll try to send them. My GPS is fucked, but if the data doesn’t go through, head toward the white path where that rocky finger at the base of the mountain juts out.”
“I know where you mean. Trigrian will be out there in a few minutes.” She signed off.
Owen got to work clearing away vines, grinding his teeth as thorns cut into his fingers and palms. He needed gloves for the job, but hadn’t brought any. He hadn’t expected to be doing any landscaping.
“Silly little fool,” he said to Ais when he’d made a big enough gap to fit his body against the rock. “Came all the way out here for berries of all things? Why?”
She didn’t answer, but he hadn’t really expected her to. She rarely answered questions or even spoke at all when they were in the same space. His sisters claimed she talked plenty. He took them at their word. He’d never been the kind of man whose self esteem was predicated on how many words a woman would babble in his presence.
The truth was, he didn’t hold himself in any esteem whatsoever.
“Please,” Ais whispered. Her body was shaking, and her white-knuckled grip looked to be loosening.
“Just hold on. I’m coming up.”
He climbed up using a couple of footholds to her right, and carefully extricated as much of her hair as he could from the thorns. Some, he loosened. Some, he chopped. The haircut would be inelegant, to say the least. “No good reason for you to be walking around out here in the boonies like an alien Rapunzel, anyway.”
If she’d been able to turn and look at him, she might have wore that confused expression that seemed to be her standard, but she couldn’t turn her head without scraping her nose and chin.
He jumped down, gave the machete a toss a couple of meters behind him, and held up his arms toward her inconsiderable waist. If Tynealean hybrids had been born in litters, she most certainly would have been the runt of one. She was probably only a meter and a half tall—about Courtney’s height. Jekhan women were, on average, closer to six feet.
“Listen,” he barked. “Fall back. I’ll catch you.”
From there, he could see the lid of one ruby-colored eye blink.
“Just fall. You know? Give a little push so you tip back at an angle. That way you don’t snag your skin. I’ll catch you.”
“Catch?”
“Yeah.” He pantomimed her falling back at an angle by putting his hands into an L shape and letting the top one fall over onto the other palm. “Like that.”
Her breath came out in a soft huff, and she gave the barest nod. “Catch.”
Thunder boomed, and the mountain shook.
She let go, shrieking, falling back haphazardly. Her dress snagged a bit more as she peeled away from the rock, but Owen was able to scramble closer and snatch her before her body careened sideways.
Her limbs flailed even as he tightened his hol
d around her torso, and she was screaming as the familiar sound of fans from Trigrian’s hover-truck approached the mountain base.
“Settle down, woman, you’re on the ground now.” Owen let her slide down the front of his body so she could feel the earth beneath her soft-soled shoes. “See? Terra firma.”
She crumbled to her knees, and her hands flew to her chest. She patted, pressed, gripped as if she were looking for pains that didn’t exist—for thorns that hadn’t sheared her. Then she closed her eyes, pressed her hands to the ground in front of her, and let out a ragged sigh. “Ground,” she whispered.
Owen let out a ragged exhalation and muttered, “Maybe you should try staying on it.”
She raised her head and fixed her odd gaze on him. Red like an albino, but she wasn’t that. The Tyneali were red from head to toe, and their red pigmentation battled the browns and olives in Jekhan hair, skin, and eye pigments. Most Jekhans would never blend in on Earth.
She parted her chapped lips and canted her head. “I—”
“I won’t get out,” Trigrian called out the truck door, his resonant voice muffling whatever the fool on the ground was about to make.
Owen waved over his shoulder without turning around. His brother-in-law wasn’t being purposefully rude, merely practical. Ais had at some point during her upbringing with the Tyneali developed a phobia of Jekhan men. She no longer took a wide berth around them like she had when she’d first arrived at the farm three months prior, but her anxiety affected everyone around her all the same, especially the Jekhan women who were particularly sensitive to each other’s mood changes. They refused to stop coddling her, though.
He jammed the machete into its sheath and gave the addlebrained woman a hard stare, not that she could see him.
They’re probably to blame for her having schemes like this in the first place.
“Come on, little fool.” Owen picked her up under her arms, and got her moving.
“No!” She scampered back to her basket, her mutilated hair standing on end making her look wild and insane as she scooped berries off the ground.