I liked Candy a lot and her son Roden was cute and polite and fun to play the flight simulator with, but I felt a real connection to Inara. Maybe even best friend connection.
What are you, twelve?
I flushed a little, but it didn’t stop me from grinning like a fool at the redhead. “Hey!”
“Hi, Ellis.” Inara dropped onto my couch as Adrix closed the door behind her.
I grabbed us both bottles of gallberry juice and joined her. The Draax had stopped posting a guy outside my door after they chipped me like a stray dog, which meant that Adrix had walked Inara to my room. I grinned at Inara. “Is Adrix still accidentally running into you in the hallways?”
She smiled a little. “Sometimes. Not as much as he was. Honestly, I’m kind of impressed at how patient the Draax are being. I don’t think there’s a single woman in the program who’s interested in dating them right now. We all just want to make money, you know?”
“That’s what they get for hiring lowers to work,” I said. “We’re all desperate for money.”
“True.” She paused. “I met your boss in the garden earlier.”
“Melu?” I said. “He was in the garden?”
“Yes. He was sitting with Galan.”
I instantly forgot my surprise that cranky old Melu went to the garden. “How is he?”
“He seems as grumpy as you told me he is. He barely looked or talked to us.”
“Not Melu,” I said. “Galan.”
“He looked the same as always, I think,” Inara said. “I don’t usually see him around the castle.”
“Right,” I said.
“Melu didn’t look as old as you described him,” Inara said. “He was kind of good looking, actually.”
I made a face. “If you had to listen to him barking orders at you every day, you wouldn’t find him good looking. Plus, he’s old. Uzel told me Melu was almost forty.”
She laughed. “That’s not old.”
“He could be our father,” I said.
“No, he couldn’t. Besides, I’m older than you.”
“Only by two years. Do you seriously want to bang Melu?”
Inara shook her head. “No, I’m just saying that he doesn’t look the way I’d pictured in my head based on your description of him.”
“What did you talk to Galan about?”
“Nothing, really,” she said. “Yoga.”
“Yoga,” I repeated.
“Yeah. Apparently, the King’s Guard practice yoga.”
I had an instant vision of Galan in the downward dog pose. Christ, was my mouth watering?
Inara poked me in the thigh. “You ever gonna admit your crush on Galan to me?”
I drank some juice and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Having a crush on Galan is pointless. As soon as the war between Emira and Cillade ends, I’ll be living my best life in an Earth prison.”
Inara scowled. “I hate it when you joke about that. It’s going to be so dangerous for you, Ellis.”
“Yeah, I know. But if you can’t joke about your impending death, what can you joke about?”
We lapsed into silence. Inara looked pale and the freckles that went across the bridge of her nose were as visible as if I’d gone over them with a marker.
“It’s fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “Maybe the war will go on for years. Candy said that Evelyn told her the last one was nine months.”
“Maybe,” Inara said.
I was being totally selfish. Inara only wanted to be here for a year and if the war continued longer than that, she’d go crazy with worry about her sister.
“How was your day?” I said. “Did you talk to your sister?”
“Yeah,” Inara said. “She had a good day. Mom was actually sober for once and she took Wendy to a movie and out for dinner.”
“What about your dad?”
Inara made a face. “He was out doing whatever drug dealers do.”
She bit at a nail. All of her nails were ragged and chewed, and I’d learned quickly over the last week or so that a sure-fire way to have her nibbling on her nails was bringing up her parents.
“Sorry, Inara, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I just hate constantly worrying about Wendy. But I didn’t have a choice about leaving. This is my best chance to give her a better life. Mom usually drinks away any money Dad gives her, and Dad doesn’t give a shit about me or Wendy.”
She chewed away at a second nail. “Wendy looks thinner to me. She says it’s just the hologram, but I don’t think she’s getting enough food. Maybe I shouldn’t have left. I could have found another job on Earth. It wouldn’t paid as well but it would have been enough to at least keep Wendy fed.”
“Are you forgetting that you had a brain tumour?” I said. “You had no choice, Inara.”
She sighed, her hands dropping into her lap. “Yeah, I know.”
“Your sister will be okay,” I said.
“You don’t know that!” Inara’s usual sweetness had suddenly disappeared. “My parents are terrible, okay? And every day that I’m not with her, she’s in danger. Every goddamn day, Ellis! You don’t have a sister, so you have no idea what I’m going through or how -”
“I have a sister,” I said.
Inara stared at me. “What? You’ve never mentioned her to me.”
“Her name was Esther,” I said.
I could see Inara’s fingers tighten around her glass of juice. “Was?”
“She died when I was fifteen.”
“I’m so sorry,” Inara said. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper or said -”
“You didn’t know,” I said. “It’s fine, Inara.”
I waited for her to ask me how Esther died. People always asked. They couldn’t help themselves.
“What was she like?” Inara said.
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.
“What was Esther like? Was she older than you or younger?”
I swallowed past the golf ball size lump in my throat. “She was younger. She was sweet… so goddamn sweet. Everyone loved her because she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, you know? My parents they… they were disappointed in me a lot, but Esther… she was their perfect angel.”
I swallowed again. “I wasn’t jealous of her if that’s what you’re thinking. Esther deserved to be my parents’ favourite. I was – well, let’s just say I gave my parents a lot of grief from the time I was eight and they were over it.”
I laughed but Inara didn’t. She set her glass of juice down and took my hand. I studied her ragged nails, my throat burning and the back of my eyes stinging. “Esther never gave them any trouble. She was three years younger than me and she… she was so kind. To everyone. It didn’t matter if you were a lower or a middle or whatever… Esther treated everyone the same. She was only twelve when she died but she already knew that she wanted to go into social work and try and help the lower kids.”
“She sounds lovely,” Inara said.
“She was. She had bone cancer,” I said.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too. My parents didn’t make much. We were,” I laughed bitterly, “middles but just barely. Enough money to live in a small house in the suburbs but not enough money to buy the amount of gallberry juice Esther needed. By the time we found out she had cancer, it was all through her bones. They did chemo – my dad had health insurance through work – but everyone knew it wasn’t going to cure her. They were just doing it to buy Esther some time while my parents tried to figure out a way to buy enough gallberry juice on the black market. They figured out a way to get the juice, but it fell through.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” Inara said.
“It was my fault.” My voice was dull, like a chef’s blade long since forgotten in the back of a drawer.
“What do you mean?” Inara said.
“It was my fault their plan didn’t work. I-I messed it up and Esther died because
of me.”
Inara squeezed my hand. “I’m sure that’s not true. You were only fifteen, what could you have possibly done to mess it up?”
Ukana. Ukana. Ukana.
The words echoed in my head and I winced. Every time I heard those words, I saw Esther’s pale, thin face and her cancer ravaged body.
“I just did,” I said. I couldn’t tell Inara the reason why, it was too shameful. Besides, she wouldn’t understand. To the Draax, Inara was beautiful. If it had been her standing in that room in her mother’s best dress and heels that made her wobble, the Draax wouldn’t have turned her away. They would have handed over the juice and Esther would have lived.
“How?” Inara said.
I shook my head and swiped at the stupid tears running down my cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. It was my fault and Esther died and my parents they… they hated me after that. They tried to pretend they didn’t blame me for her death, but they did. I could see it in the way they looked at me… or rather, didn’t look at me. One night, my mom, she... she had too much to drink and she told me that she wished it’d been me who’d gotten cancer, instead of Esther.”
“Oh, Ellis,” Inara said. A tear slipped down her cheek to darken the front of her shirt. “Honey, I’m so sorry. She should never have said that.”
I shrugged. “She was right. It should have been me. Esther was good and pure and didn’t deserve to die of cancer.”
“You don’t deserve it either,” Inara said. “No one does.”
We were still holding hands and I gave hers a brief squeeze before releasing it. “Anyway, I packed a bag and left home that night after my parents had gone to bed. I haven’t seen them since.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” I said.
“They didn’t try to find you?” Inara said.
“No. I was on my dad’s PAR plan and they never called or hologrammed me. At the end of the month, I lost access to the internet and my phone was disconnected. My dad took me off the family plan.” This time my laugh wasn’t even bitter. It was kind of funny when you really thought about it.
“Unfuckingbelievable,” Inara said. “What is wrong with them?”
“They were both in bad places,” I said. “Esther was their world.”
“You were their daughter too,” she said. “Where did you go after that?”
“I thought I could stay with a friend, but her mother kicked me out after a few days. I’ve been living on the street since then.”
“Holy shit,” Inara said. “I can’t believe you survived for seven years on the street. How did you make money to eat… where did you sleep?”
“I slept in homeless shelters if they weren’t full and alleys if they were,” I said. “It was only really bad in the winter. I made some friends and for a while we all pooled what little money we had and lived in this, like, one-bedroom apartment. There were seven of us and I slept on an air mattress in the living room with four other people, but it was better than the street.”
“What happened to them?” Inara said.
“We were boosting ships, stripping them for parts, selling them, that sort of thing. They did a job and got caught. They went to prison.”
“You weren’t with them?” Inara said.
I shook my head. “I should have been. But I was sick that day. Had a stupid cold and Torra told me to keep my sick ass in bed.”
“Lucky,” Inara said.
“I guess.”
Maybe it was luck, but it made me feel like shit. I couldn’t understand why someone like Torra, who, granted, maybe wasn’t on the complete up and up, but who took a ton of us street kids under her wing, who taught us how to survive, how to stay safe, how to not starve, could go to prison and die there, and a fuck-up like me who killed her only sister got lucky.
Not that lucky. If it weren’t for the Draax, you’d be as dead as Esther and Torra right now.
“Ellis? Why did you steal the juice from the Draax ship?” Inara said.
“I didn’t. Cheryl did, remember?”
She laughed and I grinned at her. “I was desperate. After Torra and the others went to prison, I switched to the black market juice thing. You need a crew to boost and sell ship parts and I would have starved before I found another one. It was going fine, until I owed a guy a big shipment of juice that I used instead to save a friend from dying. The guy put a marker out on me, so I tried to steal the juice from the Draax ship in order to avoid being murdered by Richie for not bringing him the juice I owed him.”
“Why didn’t you just sleep with a Draax for it?” Inara said. “I haven’t slept with a Draax before but from everything I’ve read and seen, they’re pretty good at sex.”
“Seen?” I said teasingly. “Why, Inara, are you telling me that sweet little you watches Draax porn holograms?”
Her face flamed the colour of her hair and she poked me in the arm. “Like you haven’t watched it. Anyway, why didn’t you trade sex?”
“Look at me,” I said.
She looked me over. “What?”
“I’m ugly. The Draax won’t sleep with me. Hell, half the time they thought I was a boy… although to be fair, I did dress like a guy.”
“Well, you’re a little smaller than they like, but you’re definitely not ugly,” Inara said. “Don’t say that again.”
I just shrugged. “I knew they wouldn’t sleep with me, so I didn’t bother trying.”
“How did you know? Had you tried before and -”
The knock on the door was a welcome relief. I wouldn’t explain to Inara why I knew the Draax found me ugly. Couldn’t explain it.
The door opened and Inara and I stood when Sabrina stepped into my apartment. We both curtsied and I said, “Hello, your majesty.”
Sabrina made a face and rubbed at her belly. “Hi, Ellis. Hi, Inara.”
“How are you feeling, Sabrina?” Inara said.
“Like I’m gonna pop,” Sabrina said with a laugh. She took Inara’s hand and pressed it against her belly. “This kid has been doing summersaults for the last half hour.”
Inara grinned at her. “Considering how close it is to your due date, you look amazing.”
“You’re sweet, but I know exactly what I look like and amazing ain’t it,” Sabrina said. “Ellis, how is it going in the docking bay?”
“Really great,” I said. “I love it.”
“Melu isn’t being too,” Sabrina hesitated, “grumpy?”
“Nope,” I said.
She studied me. “Is that the truth?”
“Well, he’s cranky, but I can handle it,” I said.
“Good. I have some news I think you’ll like,” Sabrina said. “I’ve spoken to Quill and he has agreed to allow you to spend time with the other women in the common room and eat meals in the dining hall if you’d like.”
“Holy shit!” I immediately covered my mouth. “Uh, I mean… sorry.”
Sabrina laughed. “Trust me, it’s fine. The other day I had to explain to Quill why Jovie was suddenly referring to my broken tablet as that rotten bastard. Anyway, you’re now allowed to go to certain areas in the castle… the common room, the garden, the dining hall, the docking bay, and the pool. Bitta, our, for lack of a better word, IT guy, has programmed your tracking chip to send an alert to Krey and Galan if you go outside of the allowed areas. So, no wandering down unfamiliar corridors or looking for the… front door. Okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Stay where you’re supposed to stay. If you break the rules, you’ll lose these privileges immediately.”
“I won’t break them,” I said.
“Good. Now,” she sank down on the couch with a low groan, “Jovie is with her dad and I want to take advantage of this kid free time. Do you ladies mind if I join your visit?”
“Not at all,” Inara said.
“The more the merrier,” I said.
I grabbed one of the
kitchen chairs and dragged it over to the couch. I could hardly contain my excitement. Finally, a small taste of freedom.
Don’t fuck it up, Ellis.
I wouldn’t. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck in my room again, or worse, sent to Iron Gate.
Chapter Thirteen
Ellis
“Your yoga skills are not improving, human. This is a basic position.”
“Sigan,” I puffed as I strained to keep my balance in the chair position, “you don’t have to put your mat next to mine at every yoga session. You know that, right?”
I fell onto my ass and begrudgingly took Sigan’s hand when he held it out to me.
“If I did not, who would help you up each time you fall over?” Sigan said.
“Inara would.”
“Don’t drag me into this.” Inara, her pale skin flushed and her legs quivering as she held the pose, carefully turned her head to look at me. “I’m only a step above you and I’ve been doing this for years.”
“It is true,” Sigan said. “You are terrible at yoga as well, redheaded human.”
Inara started to giggle and when she lost her concentration, she gave up completely and collapsed to her mat.
I sat down cross-legged next to her, ignoring the look that Bitta – who was leading the yoga class – gave us. “Tell me something, Inara. Did you ever think you’d be on another planet, in a giant garden in the middle of a castle doing yoga with a bunch of Draax warriors?”
“Nope,” Inara wiped at some pollen that was on her yoga pants. “But I kind of love that the Draax are doing yoga with us. It’s adorable, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It is not adorable,” Sigan said as he effortlessly moved into the next position. “It is an excellent way to maintain proper balance and flexibility. The King’s Guard take their duties seriously. Protecting our king requires them to be in excellent shape. Yoga is only one of the many ways they keep their bodies in perfect shape.”
“Perfect is right,” Jane muttered as she gave up and sat down on her mat on the other side of Inara. “I swear, Krey has the best looking ass in the castle.”
Rebel (The Draax Series Book 3) Page 17