by H. E. Trent
“Freak,” Reg spat.
The man hauled Reg up by his coat lapels and shoved him into a small room.
“What are you doing?” Reg demanded.
The guy pushed him, and in spite of the force, Reg managed to stay upright. He pushed him again, and again, until the backs of Reg’s legs collided with something hard, and he crumbled backward.
He looked down at the surface instead of at the Jekhan. If he’d been watching the man, he might have been able to wriggle away from the shackles he was drawing out of a small nook beneath the adjacent bench. He clasped both of Reg’s ankles, leaving just enough slack in the painfully heavy chains for Reg to hobble to the commode in the corner.
He yanked Reg’s wrist COM off of him, and found during an uncomfortably thorough pat-down two guns and all three of his knives.
The guns were basically useless, or he would have drawn them earlier. He’d used all his ammo when he’d had to steal fuel for his ship.
He tossed Reg’s shoes out into the corridor along with his socks. He even took the little notebook from his jumpsuit pocket.
All the rest Reg might have abided, but not the notebook.
“Give that back.” He lunged ineffectually at the man. With just a step back, he was too far away and had moved too quickly for Reg who was weighted down with chains and whose wrists were bound.
The Jekhan man thumbed through the book, and Reg’s ass had never clenched so hard.
Those were his contacts—his hiding places. Those coordinates might not have meant much out of context, but if those Jekhan freaks had any resources at all, they could investigate. They’d probably even go to some of the closer locations just to see what they were.
The man rolled his gaze up to Reg and, calmly, pocketed the book. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. I’m just as violent as you, probably. The Tyneali might have logged me as deviant, because most of my fellows are accommodating to a fault, as they were meant to be. But you know something?”
He walked closer, reddish-brown eyes narrowed in malice and large hands curled into fists at his sides.
“If your people’s arrival on this planet has taught us anything good at all, it’s that those of us who can do this work should be given positions like the one I have now. Before your people came, we had no military. Our peace officers didn’t even carry weapons. The Tyneali had us structure our society like theirs, but they didn’t account for the outliers who they couldn’t breed the anger out of.”
His breath was close enough to dry Reg’s eyes, which had started to water unceasingly from pain.
“Before your people came,” the man said, “I was a teacher. I taught children how to read and write and speak your languages, and I was good at my job. Last year, I saw you in Zone Seven. You grabbed one of those children I once taught by her hair, and you dragged her out of the zone like she was garbage that had been sacked for your disposal. I promised myself then that I would do everything in my power to get men like you out of Buinet and off of Jekh.”
Following a disorienting shove, he uncuffed Reg and stalked to the door. With his back turned, he asked, “What did you do with her?”
Grinding his teeth, Reg rubbed his wrists, and wishing for a dagger, glowered at the man’s spine. He had no problem with stabbing someone in the back. He was too practical to concern himself with fair fights.
The man turned. “Where is she?”
Reg shrugged. For once, he wasn’t being difficult on purpose. He really didn’t know. He’d had a lot of women from Zone Seven.
“You don’t want to talk? That’s fine.” The Jekhan man stepped outside the room, one hand lingering on the doorknob. “When you decide you want to,” the man said, “Perhaps I’ll come. Ask for Tevo, or remember this face so you can describe me.” He pointed to himself.
One Jekhan looked pretty much the same as another to him, though he doubted he’d forget the startling red of his hair or the wicked burn scars covering one cheek.
Reg spat in his direction, and the lob landed on Tevo’s smoother cheek.
He braced himself for a backhand or a punch, but the man simply drew in a ragged breath, straightened his already rigid spine, and wiped his face.
“Tevo,” the man repeated, and then he closed the door.
The lock clicked with a resounding plunk that echoed through the cell.
For a few minutes, Reg stood still, staring at the door and considering his options.
There’d never been a situation he couldn’t escape from. He’d always been able to slip away. No one but that Jekhan asshole knew where he was. Reg’s father couldn’t bail him out. He’d been dead for a year. He’d died in his ship, somewhere between Jekh and Delius Secundus, and on top of a woman who’d had the audacity to cry rape.
His mother didn’t give a shit about Reg. His crew was all gone.
“Fuck.” He kicked the bottom of the bench hard and swore against the sharp snap of pain that shot through his foot.
He fell to the floor, massaging the hurt out of his maybe-broken big toe, and trying his best to ignore the new pains that the chains falling on his ankles made.
“Fuck all of you!” he shouted.
He’d get out somehow, and when he did, they’d regret toying with him.
Obviously, they didn’t know who he was. He’d make sure they did.
CHAPTER TEN
Owen bolted awake and upright with a gasp, and clenched the rests of the armchair he’d fallen asleep in.
“Shit.”
He’d fallen asleep while working enough times that his body should have been used to the position, but usually, he woke on his own accord—not by his portable COM’s insistent peal.
Rubbing his eyes, he gave the wristband a double-tap and turned his head toward the bed in the corner.
Ais was sitting up and staring at him.
“Yeah?” he asked the COM.
“Yo,” Luke said.
Sighing, Owen leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Yeah,” he repeated.
“Where are you, man?”
“Got busy working last night. You know how it goes.” Not even a lie. He had been working. “What time is it?”
“Hell, I dunno. I’m not trying quite as hard as Precious to reset my body clock. I slept for like three hours last night before my brain decided ‘never mind.’ All I know is that one of your sister’s dudes is rattling around in the kitchen, and that means there’ll be food soon.”
“Which sister?”
“Erin.”
“Headron’s back?"
“Is he the one with the black hair?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Then Headron’s back.”
That meant Salehi had probably returned, too, and that Owen needed to rustle up some manners and go introduce himself to Headron’s uncle.
“Hate to break it to you, but he’s probably not making breakfast,” Owen said. “Headron’s a baker. He gets up before the ass-crack of dawn to make three different kinds of bread.”
“Dammit.”
“Hungry?” Chuckling, Owen leaned onto his feet and then stretched his arms over his head.
“Yeah. Starved, but I can wait a little longer to eat. Hey, you wanna go for a run like old times?”
“Fuck no.”
“Out of shape?”
“In good enough shape, all things considered.” Owen peered at the digital time readout on the tablet Ais had nestled close to her, and groaned.
Four in the morning.
He planned to piss and then go find a bed of hay to sleep in, just as he’d intended before Ais had her fright.
“I think you should go back to bed, Luke.”
“Maybe I’ll try. When are you coming over here?”
Owen closed the bathroom door behind him and knelt in front of the open shower. He needed to check the seal on the drain. “I don’t know. Breakfast maybe, or soon after.”
“All right. Cool. I’m itching to get t
o work on that code. That guy Salehi fell asleep on one of the benches in the gathering room with a chunk of it.”
“Knowing Edgar Salehi, he’ll be able to squeeze some juice out of those docs. I’m going back to sleep. Bye.”
Luke sucked his teeth. “Bye, fucker.”
Owen closed the connection, emptied his bladder, washed his hands, and then shuffled back out to the main room.
Ais was still sitting up, and watching his retreat from the bathroom.
“You can go back to sleep,” he said. “Sorry for the interruption. Luke hasn’t adjusted to Jekh or this particular time zone.”
She huddled back beneath the blankets, disturbing the dog who’d curled in front of her belly.
He gave her an indignant look, walked in a circle twice, and then plopped in front of her again.
Owen shook his head at the dog, and the dog watched him with one open eye. “You need to give that little beast a name if you’re going to keep him.”
“I keep,” she croaked.
“No good names come to mind?”
She shrugged.
Probably didn’t seem a big deal to her. Owen had learned in the past several months that Jekhans were slow to assign permanent names to their children after birth. Murki was still trying different names on to Kerry. Apparently, she’d have several middle names by the time she was an adult. The same may have held true for pets. Ais wasn’t precisely Jekhan, but could have had the same delayed naming tendencies.
He grabbed his boots and carried them over to the chair.
Ais sat up again. “Where go?”
“I need to get some sleep that isn’t upright. I’ll be back before the doctor gets here.”
She shook her head.
“I’ll be gone for just a few hours, Ais.”
She shook her head harder. “No! Is dark.”
“You’ll be all right. Didn’t the Tyneali ever leave you alone on the station?”
At the immediate reddening of her cheeks and widening of her already rounded eyes, he realized his gaffe. She probably liked when the Tyneali left her alone.
He shoved a hand through his mess of hair and blew a rough exhalation. “Shit.”
He set down the boots and eyed the laundry pile at the foot of the bed.
Could probably make a pallet.
The bedding Ais had flung the previous afternoon had been clean enough for a not-so-fastidious bachelor, so there was no reason Owen couldn’t use it to sleep on the floor.
He mounded some softer laundry into a rectangle as long as him and a bit wider, then unfurled the thick comforter. He tossed a pillow to the top, plopped down, and rolled the comforter over himself to simulate a sleeping bag.
The configuration wasn’t the softest thing he’d slept on since arriving on Jekh, but not far off from the cot he’d slept on in his cabin in Montana. He scoffed at the thought.
“What funny?” Ais peered down at him from the bed’s edge, probably having disturbed the dog again, though Owen couldn’t see him.
“Don’t mind me. Go back to sleep.”
“No. Is curious.”
He closed his eyes and let his head loll to the side. “I was just thinking about my place in Montana.”
“Mon…tana?”
“Yeah. Montana. Means mountain. That’s where I lived before I followed Court here. It’s cold and snowy there, and there aren’t many people around.”
“You like?”
“What, the cabin? Or Montana?”
“No people.”
“Oh.”
There was no good answer to the question—at least not one that wouldn’t prompt more questions, and he was too tired to be explaining nuances and contexts to a woman who didn’t know about Earth’s places.
Or know him.
He fondled the edge of the comforter, choosing his words carefully. “I guess isolation was what I needed at the time.”
“Why need?”
“Don’t you ever just want to be alone, Ais?”
“No.” She enunciated the word slowly as if she’d had to taste it first to see if it held the right flavor.
“I see. Well. I guess there are some people like that. Some people thrive on being around others, and some folks need time to refuel.”
“Refuel?”
“I mean spending time alone so you can prepare yourself for being around other people, especially people who know too much about you and what makes you tick.”
She seemed to be considering that. Her brow was furrowed, and pink lips pouted in concentration. “You…hide, like Ais.”
“I guess that’s one way to put it.”
“What hide from? What words?”
His brain needed a moment to unpack her questions and the order of the words. He wasn’t quite sure he’d gotten the gist, but with Ais, they just had to guess at what she meant and run the risk that something had gotten lost in translation.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Some people just handle things in different ways. Court and Erin, they’re pretty tough women when they have to be, but they’ve got each other. They’re only about a year apart in age. They understand each other really well. While they may not respond to situations in the exact same way, I think they’re good at predicting how the other will behave. Sometimes they know when to prevent the other from acting a certain way, and other times they’re just really intuitive about knowing when to swoop in after the fact and pick up the pieces.”
She probably thought he was talking in riddles, but he wasn’t used to having to speak so plainly. He wasn’t used to having to speak that much at all. Only Michael had ever gotten that many words out of him.
“Courtney and Erin,” she said. “No Owen?”
He put his hands together and then separated them for emphasis. “They were the two girls out of the McGarry five.” He counted off on his fingers. “Owen, Michael, Ian, Courtney, Erin. Of course they have their own little clique. We were all close, but you’re always going to be closer to a person or two. You can’t give everything to four people.”
“Oh. Who you give? Luke?”
Owen chuckled and rubbed his stinging eyes. He’d probably been more neglectful of his sleep deficit than he’d realized. “Luke’s my best friend. He knows all there is to know about me.”
But Luke wasn’t Michael. Luke didn’t have Michael’s intuition. He didn’t have Michael’s seemingly magical way of making Owen just stop and be when he needed to.
“I see,” she said simply.
She couldn’t have, but he wasn’t going to tell her about Michael. Owen hadn’t only gone all the way to Montana because nobody on that icy expanse cared if his last name was McGarry. He’d also gone there because no one there knew to ask him about Michael. No one asked him how he felt about his twin being gone. He could always tell when one of his sisters were queuing up the question and he’d disconnect the COM transmission before they could say the words. They’d stopped trying.
He waited for Ais to needle him and pepper him with more questions, as women were so wont to do, but her eyelids drifted shut, and mouth opened to let out a soft sigh of sleep.
Good.
He closed his eyes, too, but he couldn’t sleep.
Just like in Montana, he’d gotten away from talking about Michael, but he could never get away from thinking about him. He missed him so much.
He wished he’d had a chance to tell Michael that he would miss him before Michael had left. Owen would never know if his brother knew.
___
Ais opened her eyes to a puppy licking her face, the dim light of early morning reaching her corner, and Owen leaning against the kitchen sink.
“You…no sleep?” she asked.
He shrugged and wrenched on the cold water. “Tried.”
“Hard floor?”
“Nah. Mind racing. You want tea? I’ll throw together breakfast and you can have a shower before the doctor comes.”
“Yes. How long?”
“For tea or the doctor?”
“Doctor?”
“It’s around seven now. He’ll probably be here eight or nine unless he gets held up at the main house. I’m sure they’ll call over if he’s been delayed.”
Ais nodded. She very much wanted a shower. The salve on her wounds had left her skin feeling quite tacky and dirty. She also needed time to smooth her hair after washing. Her hair always seemed to take so much more time than for others, but that may have been because she’d had to teach herself how to dress it. There’d been no women on the Tyneali station. Sometimes they’d visit, but Ais hadn’t been allowed to spend any time with them. The list of people approved to interact with her had been short. There were more people on the Beshni farm than she’d been allowed to talk to in all the time she’d been on the station.
“Odd,” she mused.
“What is?” Owen set the kettle onto the heating element.
“Just think.”
“About what?”
“Uh. Lab.”
He turned and appeared to lean against the counter.
She couldn’t discern his angle for sure, but she could tell that he crossed his arms over his chest.
“Remember something?” he asked.
The puppy was at the edge of the bed peering down at the floor, so Ais scooped him up and placed him at the bedside.
He scampered to the stack of white pads in the corner, sniffed at the top one, and then climbed on.
“Smart dog,” Owen muttered. “Only showed him once. I guess the mutts usually are a little quicker on the uptake.”
“At lab,” she said. “No women.”
“Oh. Wouldn’t you say that was typical, though? Tyneali population ration is about two men to every woman, right? I wouldn’t imagine that women would want to be cooped up on a science station for years on end, especially not when their women tend to have wanderlust.”
“Don’t know. Only that, three or four men.” She held up the appropriate number of fingers. “All I saw.”
“Ever?”
She nodded.
“Were there others like you on that station?”
She opened her mouth to tell him yes, but then she’d have to explain more, and the story would have been convoluted. “Uh…” She grabbed Owen’s tablet from the floor, opened the Tyneali translation matrix Salehi had designed, and spoke to it before Owen could try to take the device back. The translation would lack nuance and the phrasing would be imprecise, but likely better than anything she could instantly translate in her head.