She sat perched on the machine and watched the sun awaken the city.
The vault of heaven over the Albho was still in the grip of night, but the sky behind Aeternus slowly paled. Gradually the gray brightened to blue, and clear washes of pale pink, coral, and sulfur yellow announced with the flourish of color the coming of the day. The structures of the city sat humbly crouched in the semidarkness, waiting for their lord to touch them with his fiery wand, transforming them into his treasured jeweled minions.
Aeternus glowed with agherz, and the golden god drew himself up and lit the desert. Dina looked to the west, where the Albho Mar stretched as far as she could see in any direction. True to its name, the Albho glittered in the early morning light like a sea of frost. The procession of huggers rolling west towards the mines raised billows of white dust in its wake that hung over the mar like mist.
Dina felt unusually strong and wondered why this was so. She would have to ask Rayn about it. Ask Rayn. A man whose real name she didn’t even know. A man with no standing, an illegal alien who lived a nomad’s existence in an untouched land. How could her life have changed so completely? So quickly?
The path of her existence had been, for all her adult life, if not always upward, at least foreseeable. In her control. She’d worked hard to achieve her professional standing, and her personal life, well, if not exciting, had been stable and safe. Now it was as though the gods had taken control and, with a tiny push, had sent the entity known as Mondina Marlijn tumbling down a steep declivity, to land only They knew where. She had joined minds with a dens. Her career was in jeopardy. Her future was uncertain. She should be in despair, but she wasn’t. She should be weak with confusion, but she wasn’t. She felt strong.
A tingle on her arm reminded her of the hour. She looked at her commband and sighed. It was time to meet with Jon. On her way back, she stopped at the AEA building and spoke to the lab technician. He was pleased to tell her that one latent fingerprint lifted from the knife had come back on file. She swore softly when she looked at the report.
“Were there any other good prints that didn’t come back on file?”
“No, sorry, the rest were too smudged.”
“What about the samples I dropped off? Any toxins present?”
He shook his head. “Nope. The granules are a phosphatide, namely lecithin, the powder is from the stricumthys shrub plant, commonly called yegwa, and the rest is pirus juice and plain distilled water.”
Dina thanked the technician and secured the knife and his report as evidence, hoping she wouldn’t need them. She hurried back to the Visitor Center for her meeting with Jon.
Dina spent the morning as she had the day before, going over the hard copy contracts with Faitaz Chukar. She particularly requested the contracts that had been in place between Mother Lode Mining and Ranchar’s administration. As she looked over the files, her brows drew together. Something was missing.
“Mr. Chukar, forgive me, but is this file incomplete? I seem to get lost after subsection 59, paragraph 4.”
The man frowned, not a hair of his golden hair out of place. “I don’t see how the file can possibly be incomplete, but let me take a look. To what exactly are you referring?” He leaned over her, his flowery cologne almost choking her.
She pointed out the missing section, and Chukar shook his head. “I don’t understand it, but it seems you’re right. Let me see what I can do.”
He returned moments later with the missing section. “My sincerest apologies, Agent Marlijn. A clerical error, nothing more.”
She flashed Chukar her prettiest smile, and he returned a slow smile of his own.
Krek, she thought.
She particularly looked for any defeasance within the contracts. In the afternoon she met with Chukar and Quay Bhelen, Mother’s chief financial officer. Dina examined in detail the company’s expenses, assets, production numbers, sales figures, and in-house geological surveys. Her request for certified copies of various documents was met by no resistance by the Mother Lode personnel.
Her evening meeting again went well with Jon. She summarized her findings and the ideas she wanted to pursue for the following day. “Jon, do we have background checks on all of Mother Lode’s on-planet administrative personnel?”
“We should have. I’ve gone over most of them.”
“I want to go over all of them again, very carefully. And I want your opinion on all of the high-ranking Mother Lode officials we’ve met so far,” she stated.
He frowned, but nodded and gave her his opinions of Hrothi, Ctararzin, Chukar, and Bhelen. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Dina. We need evidence, not opinions.”
“You’ll get it, don’t worry.”
She seemed to have her partner’s trust once again. A rueful smile accompanied her departure from his room. Jon was probably just thankful not to be hearing a request to interview Rayn. If he only knew.
As soon as she was back in her own room, Dina called to the man who had been most on her mind all day long.
Rayn?
At your service.
She closed her eyes and shivered at the soft stroke of his voice inside her mind. Can you come to the city?
Two hours. ‘Til then.
This time she couldn’t help shivering at his final words. However he had done it, it had felt exactly as if his lips had pressed against hers and had breathed the two words into her open mouth.
Dina could barely sit still. A nap such as the one she had taken the previous night was out of the question. She decided to head to the Crown early. She showered and dressed carefully in leggings and a matching jacket of a gray-blue color she knew complemented her eyes. Was she dressing purposely to please a dens? She shuddered at the thought, then dismissed it. She always tried to look her best. She topped off the outfit, as always, with her exodite ring and twisted it for a moment before entering the obligatory message to Jon on her computer. She hoped he wouldn’t question her desire to visit the hall two nights in a row.
The streets were almost as crowded as they had been when she had ridden to the Ghe Wespero to witness agherz only hours before. She again warded off offers of escort and entered the Furnace.
She didn’t sense Rayn’s presence, but she was about an hour early, so didn’t expect him to be there yet. She ordered a Mocava Lava and settled back in her seat to people-watch. She was hardly inconspicuous herself, however, and soon had young hopefuls settling down next to her. The first left when she said she was waiting for someone, but the second was more persistent.
“I’ll accept that,” said the young man. “But in the meantime, until he arrives, I could keep you company. Look at it this way. With me sitting next to you, you won’t have any really obnoxious men coming up and bothering you,” the hopeful quipped, a grin on his young face.
He wasn’t bad looking and had an unsophisticated kind of charm, so Dina decided to humor him for a few minutes. When she didn’t ask him to leave, he started telling her about himself. Dina half listened, concentrating instead on feeling for Rayn’s approach. The young man finally noticed that she was watching the crowd more than she was watching him.
“Say, what does this friend of yours look like? I could help you keep an eye out for him.”
Dina turned to him and probed his mind lightly. Krek, she thought. He just wanted to know what kind of men she was interested in. At that instant, Dina knew Rayn had arrived and was approaching the entrance to the club. She decided to have some fun with the young man.
“Well, he’s not very tall. He has unkempt brown hair, oh, and he walks with a limp. Poor soul, he’s not much to look at, but he really knows how to treat a lady.” Dina smiled to herself as she probed her admirer’s mind and picked up his shock and confusion.
A moment later, a man dressed in leather pants the color of the moon and a long taupe
duster hobbled toward Dina. The young man’s eyes widened as Dina stood up, put her arms around the man’s neck, and kissed him full on the mouth. Over Rayn’s shoulder Dina could see the man hurrying away.
“’Not much to look at?’” Rayn directed at Dina, one eyebrow raised.
The kiss had been a game, but had left her knees ready to buckle. She ignored his teasing question and tried to return to safer ground, dropping to her seat at the bar. “Are your people moved?”
He nodded. “There’s no guarantee they’ll be safe in the new location, but it’s the best that can be done right now.”
She took a deep breath. “Rayn, I need you to help me understand what I’m feeling.”
Rayn shrugged out of the duster and sat down beside her. A white T-shirt covered by a cream-colored leather vest showed off his tanned forearms and biceps that filled the short sleeves of the shirt. The gleam of his pendant drew her eyes to the vee of the shirt’s neckline, and Dina’s eyes lingered on the dark hair that curled around the star-stone. She raised her eyes to his only when he spoke again.
“What are you feeling?” he asked with a softness that gave added meaning to the question.
Dina twisted in her seat and felt her face flame. She was trying to be serious now, but he seemed intent on continuing the game. “I’m afraid you know only too well, but what I wanted to ask you about is the energy and strength I feel.”
“That doesn’t sound unusual.”
“What I felt today was. I felt powerful. And a freedom I can’t describe.”
Rayn hesitated, ordering another Mocava Lava for her and a Desert Rain, a cocktail made from uisque and a pale dry wine, for himself. He drew a deep breath. “It’s part of the bond. The shared life force.”
Her hand froze halfway to her glass. “Bond? What are you talking about?”
Rayn took a long swallow of his drink before he turned his eyes on hers. “Everything in your life, and in mine, will be different from now on. You and I have bonded, Dina, against the odds. It’s an invisible force that connects us. Like it or not, it means you’ll feel a powerful need for me, mental and physical. It’s how you can sense my presence, and I can sense yours.”
It was her turn to hesitate. She had wanted him to be serious, and he had obliged only too well. Bonded to a dens? Was it possible? She didn’t even want to think about the possibility. There were more pressing issues.
She pushed her drink away. “Rayn, if this is true, then help me. Tell me who the killer is. I know you know who he is.”
Rayn looked away, and she could tell from the glints of light reflected off his eyes that his gaze shifted more than once, from the far wall, to his drink, back to her. At last he nodded.
“Gyn T’halamar. And you’re right, he’s a dens. We didn’t come here together, and I didn’t know him on B’harata. I came here first, during the early part of Ranchar’s reign, and Gyn arrived about eight months later. I’ve run into him several times. We made an agreement to leave each other alone. I have nothing he wants. He scorns me for wanting to live in the desert with people who have nowhere else to go. He believes I’m a fool and that my powers are ineffectual. He thinks I left B’harata because I was too weak to survive there. I let him believe what he wants. And he certainly has nothing I want, so I leave him alone.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“I’ve come across some of his abandoned camps from time to time. I favor the south face of the Chayne, which looks upon the Ghel Mar, but he favors the north face, which faces the Pur-Pelag. I don’t know exactly where he is now.”
“Do you know why he’s killing miners?”
He drew his brows together. “My guess would be that someone’s paying him.”
Dina nodded. “Who do you think it is?”
Rayn shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’s somebody with more than just a few credit chips in their pockets.”
Frustrated, she played with her glass, twirling it on the bar. “How can we stop him?”
“You can’t. At least not without considerable risk.”
“Can he be reasoned with?”
Rayn brushed his hair back from his face and rounded his eyes at her. “What do you think?”
She sighed. “Based on the difficulty I’ve had reasoning with you, I guess not. If he’s being paid, can we pay more?”
He shook his head again. “You can’t trust him enough to bargain with him.”
Dina sighed. “Why wouldn’t you tell me any of this before?”
Rayn looked straight ahead and took a sip of his drink before answering. “I had a number of reasons, not the least of which was the safety of my people. The moment I allied myself with you, they all became targets.”
“So now what? What happens to us?”
He gave her a sideways glance. “Well, I can do a lot of things, but seeing into the future is not one of them.”
“What happens to two people who bond, and then are separated forever?”
He shook his head slowly. “I once heard that it’s like losing a limb. That you can still feel it, still feel the bond, even when the person is gone. Feeling someone who’s no longer there . . . it affects people differently. Some can no longer function in society. Some take their own lives. Those are extreme examples, but it happens.”
Dina stared at him.
He shrugged. “It’s not always that bad. It depends on how strong the bond was, and how strong the people involved are.”
“This bond with us . . . is it strong?”
He looked at her and merely nodded.
“Have you ever bonded before?” she asked.
He looked away again. “No.”
“You speak of the bond as if from experience.”
He studied his drink, finally taking a large swallow. “My mother and father had a strong bond.”
“What happened to them?”
“My father was killed.”
“And your mother?”
“I was young. I have two brothers. She survived for our sake for a number of years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. There’s no ‘sorry’ in our vocabulary.” He paused. “You’re not angry with me.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I can’t afford the luxury of anger right now. There’s too much to do. Besides, it happened. Maybe it was meant to happen this way. And yet . . .”
“What? You still don’t trust me, do you?”
Did she trust him? She certainly hadn’t in the beginning. So much had happened, and so much had changed for her, but had enough changed? “We’re not going to be together, are we? As you said, you’re here illegally and I’m just here on assignment.”
“Dina, the future’s not certain. But you didn’t answer my question. Or maybe you did.”
“I can’t lie to you, Rayn. I can’t even try. I’m not sure about many of my own feelings, and I’m even more unsure about yours. We’re so different.”
“Not as different as you think.”
She shook her head. “This ‘bonding’ and ‘life force.’ They’re hard for me to understand. And there are things I need that you may not. You’ll have to accept that.”
“Very well, little girl, I accept it.”
She exhaled a huff of air. “How many times have I told you not to call me that?”
“I’m at least twice your age. Did you know that?”
“No. You look no older than I do.”
“B’haratans age slowly. Anyway, to answer your question, believe me when I tell you I’ll do everything in my power to satisfy your needs. And I won’t leave you. Is there anything else you need right now?”
Dina again felt heat rush to her face. She tried to think about T’halamar instead. “Rayn, I can’t tell Jon about T�
��halamar. Since he’s forbidden me to see you, I can’t very well tell him you gave me this information.”
“I’ll send a message to your partner, asking to see him. I’ll tell him the same things I told you.”
Dina nodded. “I don’t think finding T’halamar will be a problem. The AEA has aircraft equipped with heat sensors. It shouldn’t be hard to locate a single man in the desert. Are there any others that live alone that you know of?”
“There may be one or two, but I don’t know of anyone who prefers the Pur-Pelag to the Ghel Mar except Gyn.”
“Pur-Pelag?’
“The fire basin, named for the red rock there. It’s north of the Chayne.”
Red rock. She didn’t think she had seen any red rock, had she? And yet, the picture in her mind seemed familiar. “Is there any place else besides the Pur-Pelag that has red rock?”
“Not that I’ve come across. It’s a unique geological feature confined to that one basin, as far as I know. Hot as hell, and so dusty that you can’t breathe without choking.”
Dina looked past his shoulder, her brow furrowed.
Rayn gave one shoulder a slight shrug. “Sandstone is soft. That’s why no one else lives there. Why?”
She shook her head. “Never mind. Our problem will be what to do with him when we find him. Is there anywhere else we can meet from now on? I think Jon will get suspicious if I tell him one more time I’m coming here al-merkwia.”
“Meeting should not be a problem. I have a confidante who has a room near here. I’m sure he’ll let us use it for a couple hours.”
“All right. Rayn, I have one more favor. Is there a way I can interview Kindyll and Raethe? They both worked in the mines. They may be able to give me information that miners currently in Mother Lode’s pay are reluctant to give.”
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