by H. E. Trent
“I don’t know if you know this, but he’s very good-looking in a human-guy kinda way. Brenna says our men tend to be prettier than they are handsome. Human guys tend to be a little more rugged-looking. I guess you’ll see for yourself in a day or two. Ooh, I’d love to be there to witness you getting a clear look at him.”
Ais groaned. “Embarrassed.”
“What the heck for?”
“Me…experience, not so much. Need help.”
“Help doing what?”
“Uh…” Ais made a rolling gesture with her hand and clucked her tongue. “Uh, romance?”
“Oh, please.”
“No?”
“I mean, I just don’t get the impression that Owen is the kind of guy who’d fall all over himself from having a lady whisper sweet nothings to him.”
“Then what want?”
“I don’t know. Just be interesting, I guess.”
Ais scoffed. Interesting, she was not.
“I mean it.” Amy nudged her arm with her elbow. “I can hardly call myself an authority on wooing Terran men, but I’ve been around more than I can count in the past few years. Owen strikes me as the kind of man who’ll either take you or leave you. He’s left everyone else but you, and that means something. Just be who you are, and if that’s not enough by the time all is said and done, so be it.”
“But, I want him. No ‘so be it.’”
“I understand. I really do. I just mean you shouldn’t change yourself for anyone because there’s nothing wrong with the way you are. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, okay?”
Ais wasn’t sure she believed her, but she said, “Okay,” anyway, and smiled at her cousin.
“Good. Now that we’ve got that settled, hang tight. I’m going to see if I can find your brush. Your braid is a bit lumpy.”
“Was in hurry.”
“Oh? Were you doing a little more than just watching the boys crunch code last night?”
Ais twined her fingers atop her lap and tightened her smile. She decided that some things should be a mystery, and she wanted to keep the idea of Owen all to herself for a while.
“Uh-huh.” Amy squeezed her shoulder before walking away.
Ais got comfortable on her side, picking at the fringe on the blanket and looking out into the fields toward movements that must have been her puppy.
Puppy…
She sighed and twined a few pieces of blanket fringe into a braid. “Name. Need good name.”
She’d been putting off the naming task for far too long and she needed to be able to call him by the same name every time so he’d obey her.
She pondered naming him after her favorite fruit, but dismissed that idea. Too many Jekhan fruits carried sexual intimations. She thought of a dessert or two, because the puppy was so sweet, but no one would take a dog who’d been named “Pudding” seriously. After all, naming a pit bull “Sue” hadn’t worked out so well for the Ciprianis.
“Maybe…”
Maybe something about him.
He was always sniffing around and making nests on tops of things that weren’t really beds. Ais used to do the same when she was on the station and then on Reg’s ship. She’d push together whatever soft things she could find and hide herself in them so she’d feel less exposed.
“Nestor.” She tried the name with her mouth, shaping the sounds carefully. “Nestor. I like.” She nodded with finality.
She just needed to find the pup and tell him who he was.
She straightened up and looked to the fields for moving grasses again. “Puppy?”
From where she was seating, she probably wouldn’t have been able to see any disruptions if he’d gone more than a couple of feet into the grain, so she pushed up onto her knees and reached for her cane. “Puppy? You know voice. Come.”
She heard the dry rasp of grasses rubbing together, but the noise was too loud—like there was too much of it all at once. Her puppy wasn’t big enough to make that much of a disturbance.
Scrambling to her feet and tapping the cane in front of her, she called again, “Puppy?”
Amy shouted through the open cottage door, “Did that little bugger disappear?”
Ais turned to respond, mouth open and breath already drawn, but before she could get the words out, a flash of red in the periphery of her one open eye sent a burst of paralysis through her. She pulled air into her lungs and screamed.
She knew him, that creature. Knew his face. Knew his habits from the lab she’d been sequestered in for so many long years, so when he raised his arm, she knew there would be a stunner in his hand.
She rolled into a protective ball on the ground, tucking her head beneath her arms and screaming like she’d already been stunned. The memory of the pain of the device was enough to trigger her.
“Go!” Amy yelled. “You’re not taking her! She’s all I...” She groaned. “All I have left!” The cane was ripped from Ais’s hand, and Ais looked up to watch Amy swing it clumsily at the Tynealean visitor while shouting wordlessly.
Scared, but still fighting, and wildly at that.
If Amy can, I have to get up. Get up!
Ais pushed up to her hands and knees and patted the ground for the big rock she’d felt earlier. Finding it, she picked it up and heaved it.
The stone hit the tall alien’s shins, and the thing seemed to recoil, and then backed several meters away before disappearing into thin air.
“What the hell?” Amy shouted.
Ais fell back onto her knees, hanging her head and rubbing her arms rapidly with her hands. She was so cold again—so scared, thinking about that place where they’d kept her. “Fast ships. Fast escape.”
“Come on.” Amy reached down to scoop Nestor—the dog had finally returned—pulled Ais to her feet, and got them moving at a fast jog toward the farmhouse. “I don’t trust anything that drops in without warning. You can’t stay out here anymore. You need to be around the people who can shoot things. Crap, for that matter, so do I.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“So, you’re saying this happened before, and you didn’t say a goddamn thing to anyone here?” Court shouted at Owen.
Often, Courtney’s scolding was too comical to take seriously because she was small and cute, and pregnancy made her look far more approachable than she was in reality. Owen knew better than to open his mouth yet, though. Too many people were staring at him with suspicion. Whatever he said needed to be exceedingly diplomatic.
He crossed his legs under the kitchen table and dumped some sugar into his coffee. Court was rationing the coffee supply, but given the circumstances, he figured she’d have to get over his theft of a portion.
Growling, Court turned to Ais, who was sitting on a stool across the room nibbling on a corner of bread as Amy rubbed her back. “I talked to you after that, didn’t I? Why didn’t you say something? Was Owen holding your tongue?”
“Come on.” Owen tossed down his spoon and pushed his seat back. “Don’t cross-examine her. You want to yell at anyone, yell at me.”
Court turned back. “Oh, so you’re talking now?”
He shrugged. “Ask your questions.”
“What were you thinking?”
“A lot of things at once, as always. Obviously, there’s a lot of shit going on here and beyond, and there’s never a point where I’m not worrying about multiple disasters. Granddad’s in Buinet doing God-knows-what, we’ve got those decoded documents to figure out what to do with, you’re pregnant again and super anemic—yeah, trust me, that’s not the secret you think it is—Erin’s pregnant with twins who I hope aren’t sharing a placenta because we know how that shit could turn out, and yes, we have a blind hybrid on the farm whom I thought was being giving too much latitude to get into trouble.”
“Okay, first of all?” Court showed him a fist. “Screw you, dude. And second of all, we cooperate around here. I—”
“Let me say something,” Erin interrupted. She came out of the pantry scowling, and holding
a giant mixing bowl. “You never talk to people, Owen. You never tell us what’s bothering you.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Makes a lot of difference. Trust me, no one’s more worried about these babies than I am.” She put up a hand to stave off the objection Esteben was obviously about to speak and, intelligent man that he was, he closed his mouth. “What happened with you and Mike was awful, but that was a rare thing. A fluke.”
“So, you’re not worried?”
“Of course I am, but I told Dorro about you and Mike. I’m not stupid.”
“I never said you were stupid.”
“But you act like I am sometimes.” She rolled her eyes. “Not just me. But anyway, I know how to make correlations. Dorro’s going to be watching me very carefully throughout the pregnancy and monitoring both babies during each exam. That’s all we can do. That and…hope. I’ve got to keep living life and not get preoccupied by all the bad things that could potentially happen.”
“Owen, I don’t think Michael would want you beating yourself up over something that was beyond anyone’s control,” Court said.
“Nah,” Luke said. “He wouldn’t have. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he hated people pitying him. He thought pity was a waste of time. I’m convinced that’s why he did what he did at the end.”
“What’d he do?” Amy asked softly.
Owen put his head back and closed his eyes.
Apparently, they were going to go there. He’d been so good at running from any conversations about Mike—he’d gone all the way to Montana not to have to continuously engage in the discussions, but there was nowhere to run on Jekh. There were four McGarrys on the planet, and apparently that was critical mass.
“I think Mike knew he was running out of time,” Court said.
“He knew,” Owen said quietly. “He fucking knew. He wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t, and maybe I would have done the same thing. He didn’t want to see people crying and bent out of shape over him, and he wanted to slip away on his own terms. Someone should have been there, though. If I hadn’t had my head so far up my ass, I might have known something was up. I—”
At the press of a cool, soft cheek against his, he jerked and gripped the table, and Ais pulled away. He recognized her gasp.
He hadn’t heard her approaching, and he’d probably hurt her feelings. He was so good at that.
He forced his eyes open and made himself look at the shame on her face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t hear you.” He put a hand to small of her back and nudged her back where she’d been. He couldn’t refuse every offer of comfort anymore. He was too ragged, and there were to few people he’d let touch him. He welcomed her soft, exploratory touches.
Slowly, she took a seat on his lap, and Owen closed his eyes again so he didn’t have to see the questions in his sisters’ stares. He could close that sight out, at least.
“I should have known,” he said before they could ask any obvious questions. “Even if he didn’t want anyone there, I should have been there to say goodbye.”
“Michael wasn’t a goodbye kind of person, though,” Court said on a delay. She was probably staring at him, but he didn’t want to open his eyes to conform the guess. “I talked to him almost every day. He never said bye. He’d just make some joke and end the call. You shouldn’t have been punishing yourself over him for all this time. The torture isn’t productive, and I don’t think misery is the legacy he wanted to leave behind.”
“No, his legacy is frozen in test tubes in a lab somewhere,” he said drolly.
Luke groaned.
Owen straightened up and redistributed Ais’s weight farther back on his thigh. He opened his eyes, because McGarrys confronted things, and he couldn’t really run from his little sisters, anyway.
They weren’t even looking at him. Or maybe they had been, and just weren’t anymore. Erin was chewing the inside of one of her cheeks and staring at her empty bowl. Court was twirling one of her long curls and looking forward, but at nothing in particular, the best Owen could tell. They were probably thinking about Mike. He’d left a hole in their clique, and one that couldn’t be mended.
Ais turned her uncovered eye toward him.
He wondered what she could see at that range—if his face was just a flat collection of shadows, or if she could actually see pain in it.
She pressed a hand to his cheek, comforting him instead of the other way around. She’d just had the fright of her life, and yet she was the one doing all the consoling.
I don’t deserve that. She deserves better than that.
He took her hand, kissed the back of it, and set it atop the table.
“Anyway. Look, I’m sorry,” he said to his sisters. “I should have said something about what Ais said she saw, but with everything else going on, I sort of pushed the event out of my mind.”
“Or maybe you just didn’t want us to interfere,” Erin said.
“Okay, we’re not gonna go there,” Luke said. “You can talk about whether or not you think Ais is suffering from some kind of Jekhan Stockholm syndrome later. Right now, what I want to know is how that particular Tyneali knew to come to this farm and, also, what we’re going to do about his visit.”
Court sighed. “You’re right. You may be a slimeball, Luke, but you’ve always been good at keeping a group of delinquents on task.” She turned to Salehi, who, sitting at the opposite end of the table from Owen, and been watching the McGarry family drama shake out with quiet amusement. “I think you’re the only person in this room who’s ever interacted with the Tyneali in person. Was the behavior of the one who was looking for Ais seem typical to you?”
“That’s hard to say. The ones I met were at meetings that had been prearranged, but I don’t think them being so covert is unheard of. Many people on Jekh have gleaned stories about them quietly making visits here and there on the planet to deliver medicine and supplies. No one ever sees them come in, so perhaps stealth is their custom. The ones who visited Little Gitano most recently did leave a sort of calling card before they showed up personally, though. No one knew what to make of it until they arrived.”
“What was the calling card?” Owen asked.
“A tablet. The only file in the directory was a list of all the things they brought the next day. No one knew where the device had come from, only that the tablet wasn’t any of theirs and the technology wasn’t familiar. Allan had it for a while, but the Tyneali took the tablet back when they left.”
“I don’t think this one left a calling card,” Owen said.
“Probably because he wasn’t looking to bring supplies, but to take something instead,” Luke said.
“Ais.”
Ais seemed to curl in on herself on Owen’s lap—into a defensive position that made him grip her tighter. He’d made the mistake of leaving her in the cottage, but he wouldn’t do that again. She needed to be able to rely on someone, and he’d failed her again and again and in too many ways…and on too many days.
If he were as smart as everyone accused him of being, he would have tipped her off of his lap and sent her on her way. He couldn’t keep her. He was bad for her, but if he were going to let her go later, he wanted to hold her for just a little while longer. He’d probably never again encounter such a sweetly foolhardy woman.
“I want to know how the hell they found her,” Court said. “I really don’t want to think that their technology is so awesome that they can home in on a single person on a planet this size and swoop in to grab them.”
“Why not, if they have her exact genetic sequence?” Luke asked. “I mean, shit, you watched enough episodes of Star Trek with me that your science imagination should be a little better than that. If the scanners on the starship Enterprise could determine how many human beings were on the surface of a volcano planet, I’m pretty damn sure the Tyneali have ways of locating one of their experiments.”
Esteben rubbed his chin contemplatively. “Especially if she�
��s being tracked.”
“Tracked? What do you mean?” Erin asked him.
“Simple, is it not?” Salehi said. “If you want to keep track of valuable things you think belong to you, what do you do? And I mean valuable living things.”
“You take them to the vet and get them microchipped,” Luke muttered.
Salehi chuckled. “Not a bad comparison, actually. The Jekhans know all about being chipped, because the Terrans tried to tag them all when they started their press into the major cities. The Tyneali likely have far more sophisticated technology than what the Terrans were using. Their trackers are probably less detectible and have less radioactive activity. Ais might not even know where hers is.”
Ais stiffened again.
“If she has one,” Owen corrected. Putting his lips closer to Ais’s ear, he whispered, “Do you think you do?”
She put a hand beneath that ear, and he thought perhaps his beard had scratched her, but when he leaned back, he saw she was pressing some spot near her hairline. “What there?”
He lifted her finger and replaced it with his. There was a tiny little bump there—easy to mistake for natural texture, but not once someone knew to look. The bump was a bit too firm, like the end of an old-fashioned ballpoint pen.
“What’s there, Owen?” Amy asked.
“She has a bump under her skin. To the eye, the protrusion appears to be a little mole, but the dome doesn’t feel natural when I touch it. It’s too hard.”
“See if you can get hold of Dorro,” Erin said to Esteben. “He may not be home yet, though.”
He nodded and left the room.
“We’ll get that thing out of you if we can, Ais,” Court said.
“But what are we’re going to do after that?” Erin asked. “They already know she’s here.”
“We’ll just make her hard to get.” Luke ambled over and gave Ais’s shoulder a squeeze. “Bet you’re tired of being locked down.”
She sighed and dropped her head.
“Hey,” Erin said soothingly. “Hopefully, your cloistering will just be for a little while. We’ve got the brainpower here to figure something out, even if that something is that we just have to negotiate with them. You’re not an experiment, you’re a person, and you should get to choose where you live. You don’t want to live on the station, do you, Ais?”