NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  “They were fighting me for CPU cycles to develop those engines. I couldn’t get the cycles by reasonable means,” Rainer stared directly at her again, and his tone chilled to ice and steel, “so I got them through unreasonable means.”

  Her blood turned to frozen pellets as he contemplated his cards and added some dried strawberries to the pot. “They told me you were here. I also noticed you filched the oranges, so I decided to get them back.”

  “I wasn’t aware they weren’t my oranges,” she said, astonished and mortified and fuming.

  “They’re about to become my oranges. Again.”

  She surged to her feet and flung her cards at him. “You shitty excuse for a male. You’re an officer, my damned husband, and you think you own the food? Are you going to make me eat out of your hands?”

  Werewolf males had some biological imperatives hard-wired in their brains: food belonged to the pups, then the females. If there was no food left, and the females didn’t care to share, males went hungry.

  “My father was human, and even he’d never try to take food from a female. You degenerate, pathetic, miserable excuse for a werewolf.” She stepped past him, kicking him in the shoulder with her knee as she did so. “I’ll find my own way back to my guppy bowl.”

  FIX THIS

  Rainer got to five hundred sixteen just as the door to their quarters closed behind them. He’d have gotten much higher than five hundred and sixteen if he hadn’t had to start over at least six times from sheer frustration.

  He’d followed her after she’d stormed out, leaving behind the nuts and fruits, and instead eaten an elbow in the gut for getting too close to her on the walk back up. Her scent of fury was uncomfortably real. But Gaia damnit, what the hell had she been thinking!

  “What were you thinking?” Rainer growled. “My wife can’t be down there. You’re an officer’s wife, for Gaia’s sake!”

  “Gaia,” she whirled around on him so fast he backed up a step, “you want to invoke Gaia? You hypocrite! Gaia would put you into the abyss for taking your female’s food! If you want to speak to me like a wolf, act like one worth my concern!”

  Command training covered thousands of conflict resolution scenarios. Experience covered a thousand more. None of them seemed appropriate to this situation: a furious she-wolf who had every single reason to hate him. Pulling rank was the option of last resort and would only make her despise him more.

  Instinct growled from some deep recess of his mind he’d never previously used. The not-voice whispered Lachesis was dangerously close to an edge he’d never get her back from. She was against an emotional cliff, and one more push from him, and she’d go over. He’d never get her back.

  The not-voice paced, weighing, observing, while he tried to parse all the new information and mesh it with his more familiar brain with all its complex corridors and intricate wiring.

  She yanked at the pins holding her wine-red hair in an unforgiving twist against her skull.

  “What were you thinking?” he demanded, although he was really asking why the hell she was letting her hair down and distracting him further. The scent of clove and roses drifted off her hair as the long locks fell free in liquid-like waves.

  Lachesis’ shining red hair was not just a glorious, rare color… it was so long and full that to cut it would have been a sin, but said she’d worked very hard for a very long time to be able to afford to keep it. He’d known from her pictures in her file that she had long hair—it’d been listed as a criticism and vanity—and had arranged for its ongoing care before her arrival.

  The long hair transfixed him, told him how proud and resourceful she was. It was a crown of prestige and glory and fierceness. She would not be fully tamed. She would weather the looks and disapproval of the weak. She was not afraid to be strong or face challenges from those who wanted to take her prestige from her. It was defiance, vanity, the crown of a she-wolf who could hunt her own food, and have enough to spare.

  His fingers, filthy and grimy and unfit to touch that hair in their current state, wanted to run through the waves. Her hair had been like a silk rope when damp. He wanted to feel the silk cloud drift through his fingers, feel it tickle his skin, drift around both of them—

  “I’m not your fucking guppy, Rainer,” she spat at him, her scent helpless fury, and something worse: total despair.

  “You need to stay out of sight,” he said stubbornly, ignoring the not-voice telling him he was about to screw this up permanently.

  She clutched the pins. Plain bone pins, but also expensive and difficult to procure, since bone could be recycled into useful materials, another expense of long hair. “And what am I supposed to do here all day?”

  “You have the entire library of NightPiercer to amuse yourself with and a busy mind,” Rainer said. “Stay put and stay out of trouble. My wife cannot be down in that den. You’re lucky that Engineering is the section that keeps watch. What do you think Bennett would have done if he’d found you down there?”

  “If the officers turn a blind eye to it, who cares?”

  His anger seethed. She was not this stupid. “He’d have shut down the den and announced it publicly. It’d have sprung up again somewhere else in a few months, but the damage to you and I—”

  “I don’t give a shit about damage to you,” she growled.

  That not-voice howled. “You were a very expensive purchase.”

  “And you treat me like a goldfish!” she shouted. “My brain is more than a needle-prick cluster of neurons! You can’t kill me, so you’re going to drive me insane? Humiliate and degrade me along the way?!”

  “If you were going to sneak out of here why the fuck did you choose a gambling den?” Rainer’s voice rose, his own frustration growing as another voice warned him it was time to start counting.

  She turned away from him.

  “Don’t,” he growled.

  “Or what? Are you going to lock me in here next?”

  Yes, yes, he was.

  No, no, he couldn’t.

  He growled in his throat, managing to count through the haze of frustration and anger as that not-voice barked to make this right. Make it right. Fix it! Fix it!

  His nerves and fibers tore in two directions that lead to the same goal: FIX IT.

  Her voice was poison when she spoke. “You hate Crèche, and I was Crèche, but they do teach Command staff here about Exodus wolves, don’t they? Or is that just Ark, or is it you don’t care because you hate Crèche so damn much?”

  “We are trained extensively on Exodus Syndrome,” Rainer said, the smell of her despair as thick as Europa’s ocean under a crust of bitterness and anger.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. They were a strange color: hazel with flecks of gold, like autumn leaves across a blue sky. “You don’t even realize what a monster you are. You stomp and traipse all over everything to get what you want, and everyone puts up with it because they’re doing that Crèche math you hate so much. Keep throwing she-wolves at him, who cares if they beg to be free within weeks, just get a pup from him any way that it has to happen.”

  “I only do it when it is absolutely necessary for the greater good,” Rainer snarled. “And I am not sorry when I do what has to be done.”

  She snorted and laughed. “Whatever. Go wash. You stink, and I don’t want to smell you from across the quarters.”

  Rainer didn’t budge. “We aren’t done.”

  “I’m done. Are you locking me in now?”

  She had him as much against a wall as he had her against a cliff. He growled again in frustration. She hadn’t walked away yet. The not-voice whispered that was good. Something was holding her here. He tried to study her through the cacophony in his brain as the unfamiliar not-voice howled at him.

  Survival. The fight. She wanted to fight. She still had the will to fight and survive. That wasn’t gone yet.

  Yet.

  She was expecting an answer: yes or no, nothing else. It gave him a few precious seconds to sort
out the tangle of her scent. The acrid scent that said she despised him, her anger, but mingled and twisted with it: grief and despair. Deep, deep despair and a lack of hope. He’d smelled hopeful so often he recognized its absence. All of it the not-voice demanded FIX IT with a primal intensity that crowded out his other thoughts.

  Her trust was the most important thing to reclaim, but he had to cure the despair.

  The original occupants of NightPiercer, Generation Zero, had been selected not only for physical, intellectual, and technical suitability, but emotional durability. Everyone had had to have a certain minimum level of empathy so they could band together and form a tribe and value the whole, but also not exceed a maximum amount of empathy so they’d be able to compartmentalize the trauma of knowing billions had died, and the ability to overcome an anticipated amount of survivor’s guilt.

  But the trauma Generation Zero had suffered had been grossly underestimated, and despite best efforts, a unique form of survivor’s guilt—later named Exodus Syndrome—had emerged. Faced with the reality that they would never go home again, and that their only purpose was to keep a ship going and breed children that would never see Earth, human and wolf alike had fallen into a despair unlike anything that had ever been seen before in the history of sentient life on Earth.

  The root cause had been loss of purpose and sense of place. Werewolves were far more prone due to the loss of conventional packs, and the instinct that the pack was the living whole. Despair, depression, emotional volatility were the first insidious symptoms. Then night terrors began, then complete disassociation as the mind abandoned contact with a reality it could no longer endure. The brain began to disintegrate. Complete psychosis came next, followed by brain stem death.

  All Command officers were trained in spotting the warning signs of Exodus Syndrome. Depending on the root cause, it could be successfully treated in the earliest stages.

  Lachesis was her own Generation Zero: she’d never go back to Ark, she’d been taken from everything she’d ever known, been stripped of her purpose, denied even her Dying Art, made to marry a wolf who couldn’t give her pups, and been told to somehow make a new life from less than the original Generation Zero. She was a prime candidate to develop Exodus Syndrome.

  “You were going to take the orange peels from me,” she was saying, her voice even more scathing.

  Rainer refocused on her. “What?”

  “You said you were going to take my oranges from me,” she repeated.

  He arched a brow. “Poker table trash-talk offends you? I find that difficult to believe.”

  “You fucking degenerate,” she snarled with renewed, pure fury. “I’ve been thinking since I met you you were genetically engineered.”

  “I’m not genetically engineered.” That was illegal even with livestock. No one would have wasted Omega semen and his mother’s limited fertility on tampering with an embryo.

  “Oh, I think you are,” she said, raising both brows. “They made you smart, flipped on all those genes, opened all those throttles, except it fucked with your basic programming like empathy and don’t take a female’s food. There are things a male should never say to a female, and that’s one of them.”

  His attention focused further, sharpening to a fine, needle-like point. That was a biological imperative Crèche would prefer to say was cultural. Lachesis didn’t say it ironically. She didn’t dare him with it. She was furious he had tread on that line that they both knew wasn’t allowed to exist on the ship.

  It was a confession, an act of desperation, and an act of trust: he’d offended her. She’d expected more. She’d expected better. She’d expected him to be one basic thing if nothing else: a male werewolf.

  He wasn’t even that to her now.

  Many things had to be abandoned once they’d left Earth. Religion had been the first thing to be frowned upon. Especially since the werewolves believed that Gaia had warned the werewolves before humans. The official history was Hade had seen the end result of climate and Earth changes and gotten started twenty years sooner than the rest of the world.

  The werewolf version of history was Hade’s mate (not wife, mate) had been warned by Gaia.

  Nobody was stupid enough to outlaw it, but religion was a private pursuit, to be kept out of sight and never discussed. Preach or promote at extreme peril. Old-world views were also deeply frowned upon, like the werewolf tradition that the female ate first. Packs were strictly forbidden, and the old laws that had governed the species for millennia shelved. Harmony and parity meant survival, and survival was the goal.

  He waited until the count of thirty-three, but Lachesis still didn’t retract her statement, or flinch. Had she misspoke and was already so stressed she didn’t care, or worse, didn’t realize? Or did she trust that he wouldn’t say anything? Or was she trying to trap him in something?

  The puzzle warmed him another degree. He didn’t know the answer, and her scent and expression and posture told him nothing, and the not-voice growled with pleasure at the challenge she offered him, also noting the curve of her hips and breasts, the shine of her hair, the way the locks taunted his hands to touch them.

  How many lovers had she had who had only wanted to grasp handfuls of that hair? A dozen. Three dozen. At least. A fist full of that hair with one hand, taking care of their pleasure with another.

  Such a challenge. Such a beautiful, intriguing, maddening, infuriating challenge. A puzzle he would have to work to solve. But first, he needed to defuse her justifiable fury, and back her away from her erroneous belief he had been bred in a tube. “You’re right. I apologize.”

  “It’s a little late for that, wouldn’t you say?” The scent of her fury lashed his snout.

  Well, if they were being old-world, he’d happily oblige her, since that’s how his parents had secretly raised him.

  Food was sacred to werewolves. He couldn’t bring her warm prey as a peace offering, but he needed to bring her something else of intimate, personal value. If she was at the point of thinking his behavior was so unacceptable she believed he’d been created in a tube, he had gone much too far in his plans. Time to radically alter course. “If you give me your word that you will stay here, and not leave, I will bring you something to give you purpose.”

  She eyed him like he was a viper she couldn’t decide was going to strike or not. “What kind of something?”

  “Do I have your word?” he countered.

  “You know my word is good, but yours seems to be worth less than a cashew,” she said darkly. “I’m not making any bargains with you.”

  The not-voice told him to give her what she wanted. Anything she wanted. Anything that would fix what he’d broken. That voice was, however, not the one that wore a Commander’s stripes. “My word is worth a little bit more than a cashew.”

  “Not with me it isn’t.”

  True, but it didn’t change he couldn’t trust her. “I need you to stay out of sight here because you’re the first new person to be on NightPiercer in thirty years. Word is out that a hive of bees were paid for you.”

  “So you would think I should be out showing NightPiercer I know how to act proper.”

  She had yet to display she could act proper by NightPiercer standards. Not that she knew what those standards were. The fight would have to wait, he couldn’t give her what she wanted, except for him to be clean and out of her sight. “I’m going to go wash. We’ll argue in the morning. If I catch you outside of the quarters tomorrow, I’m going to drag you to Medical as having Exodus Syndrome and fear of incoming lupine psychosis. I’m sure the last people you want to talk to are Medical and Crèche. I know they’re the last people I like talking to, but if you push me to it, I will.”

  “I call you a genetically engineered degenerate, and you try to tell me I’m insane. How valiant.”

  “You’re the one that mentioned you’re concerned about Exodus Syndrome. You also have that FERAL stamp on your file, so I’m sure they won’t be nice about your treatmen
t.”

  “I do?” she asked, brows arching.

  Rainer paused. He studied her a moment, waiting for a quip or sarcasm, but her hazel-autumn eyes were open and wide, like a sea of leaves against a gray-blue sky. “You didn’t know?”

  “I suspected, but you mean I was officially branded a feral?” Lachesis softened all over, like some of the fight had been bled out of her. She wouldn’t have seen her own file, and ferals didn’t get told they were feral unless necessary. Ferals were generally unfit for Command and subject to extra scrutiny their entire life for fear of another Sunderer.

  He’d managed to avoid getting the stamp himself, but only because his parents had not pretended he hadn’t been born one.

  All of her seemed to dim.

  She grasped all of her hair, drew it over one shoulder, and coiled it around her arm in a shining wine-red band. “I guess you would have seen my file in all its uncensored glory, Commander. So when did Crèche decide to brand me? Does it have a date?”

  It was too late to pull back what he’d said. “I didn’t see anything but your basic file, except I was told you were officially branded a feral. I was not given a choice. It was mentioned in passing.”

  “Do you know when I got marked?” she asked it like she knew the answer.

  “When you were young. Less than five.”

  “Guess that confirms my suspicion that Clotho was my mtDNA replacement.”

  Siblings were very rare. Lachesis was an Omega-sired, like he was, and that always came with a risk. “Feral” had once been a compliment and prized trait. It was such a prized trait on Earth that it hadn’t occurred to anyone how dangerous it’d have been on a ship when a werewolf with intense drives decided those giving the orders needed to stop breathing their air.

  From the summary he’d gotten on Clotho—which had been included, he’d surmised, to make Lachesis seem more promising—was the younger sister was a musical genius. She was also summarized as pleasant and agreeable, if stubborn. Lachesis’ personality had been summarized as aloof and reserved. Not unflattering, but not nearly as flattering as pleasant and agreeable.