Assassin's Hunger (17 page)

Shaxi broke a lume stick and attached it to the top of a stake she’d driven into the sand in front of the runabout.

A thin line of smoke or steam curled up from the smashed front corner, but she turned with her hands on her hips to survey the canyon. The stone walls twisted upward, banded in alternating layers of ochre and red except where darker streaks dripped down in vertical lines, shimmering in the light.

“Terraforming was supposedly halted before free-flowing water was established,” she said. “But looks like there are some seeps, at least.”

“We have supplies, including water,” he told her. He’d checked them over since he
was
auxo as far as anyone on the
Asphodel
knew. “Do you need to replenish the energy you gave the runabout?”

She turned with a frown. “I’m not just a battery you need to recharge.”

He lifted one hand. “Of course not.”

But she spun on her heel and stomped back to the runabout, raising puffs of dust with each annoyed footfall. “Dig out the repair case.”

By the time he’d retrieved the case with its collection of spare parts, she’d wrenched up the crushed front panel and exposed part of the engine.

“Power cable?” He reached for a replacement when she nodded. “Feel free to remind me that you offered to drive.”

She had her hand out for the part but after an instant, she raised her gaze to meet his. When he gave her a crooked smile, the wariness in the set of her mouth eased.

“I think when the scanners malfunctioned I would not’ve responded with your…zeal,” she said.

“You mean you wouldn’t have crashed into a wall?”

She shrugged. “And then we would’ve been electrocuted and shredded by the storm.”

“Choices, choices.”

“This one we will recover from.” She disconnected the cable severed by a sharpened edge of the crushed plysteel.

He held the new piece while she wired it down and then wrenched the bent paneling back into place while she returned to the cabin to reinitiate the battery. Realizing she’d removed the paneling herself gave him a new appreciation for her strength.

He stuck his head into the cabin. “How’s it going?”

She muttered something that sounded like a curse. “There must have been enough ionization in the air to short the battery. The charge is completely drained.” She hesitated and then touched the interface on the console. “I could try to boost it myself—”

He took her arm and hauled her out of the runabout. “You are not going to drain yourself to recharge the damn runabout.”

Her jaw tightened, but considering how strong she was, the fact she’d let herself be pulled away made it clear she was aware what the depletion would have done to her.

He released her at once, but disapproval kept his tone sharp. “You aren’t going to kill yourself for this.”

“But we—someone—needs to get to Rampakh and find the parts to repair the
Asphodel
.”

“And
we
will. We just need to give the battery time to do an atmospheric recharge.”

She folded her arms over her chest, her enhanced hand tucked out of sight. “Gathering energy by stripping molecules from the air will be time consuming. Time the
Asphodel
doesn’t have if the shriving is already in-bound.”

She was right. If the
Asphodel
was grounded, that gave their enemy more time to track them down and find the girls. And he wasn’t there to stop it.

He’d sworn he would do whatever he must to prevent the l’auraly from falling into the wrong hands. But he wasn’t willing to sacrifice Shaxi for a thrice-tangled battery.

He had to save her for the worse to come.

“We wait,” he said firmly. “Meanwhile, let’s see if we can find more of that water you were looking at.”

She straightened, her expression lightening. “Breaking down H
2
0 molecules would go much faster.”

After grabbing a siphon, several collapsible canisters, and a handful of lume sticks, they headed deeper into the canyon.

But the seeps down the walls seemed to creep back up the farther they went, until the black lines of moisture faded to gray and then to nothing.

Shaxi stopped. “You said we had supplies. We could use our water. I don’t need to drink as much—”

“Shh,” he said. “Take a breath. Do you hear that?”

She pursed her lips, her head cocked. “Dripping.”

“And it smells like a lot of water.”

The canyon bottom opened out as they rounded the last curve into a dead end.

Shaxi made a soft sound. “The locals talked about oases in the deep desert, but I never thought it would be so…”

Eril waited for her to finish, but she didn’t. On assignment, he’d been to true sanctuaries, lush and tropical or secluded and mountainous. Sometimes he’d robbed or killed in those sanctuaries, which somewhat altered his perception of what a haven should be. But he had to agree, he’d never seen one like this.

The terraforming of Khamaseen hadn’t proceeded far enough to allow for true plant growth, but a few hardy specimens of moss and lichen that provided the initial habitats in most terra projects had made a niche for themselves. From a dark horizontal seep about halfway up the canyon wall, they spilled down in thick, terraced mats. For whatever genetically modified or naturally selective reason, their plush and frilled surfaces were not varied hues of green, but purple, reflecting brilliantly in the light of the lume sticks. Royal purple plumes of proto-ferns near the wettest parts of the seep graduated outward to pale lavender lichens, flat and close to the rock.

At the base of the seep, a wide pool of water echoed the sound of invisible droplets. The light bounced up off the water, playing off the walls in gentle rings.

“So beautiful,” Shaxi breathed. “Like a dream.”

He had not known cyborgs dreamed.

“I almost wish…” Her voice trailed off, softer than the trickle they couldn’t see.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said more briskly. “Let’s test it, make sure it won’t eat through the converter, and get back to the runabout.”

At the side of the pool, the air was cooler, softer. Eril set a probe in the liquid. After a moment, it chirped.

“Pure as new-fallen snow.” He set the siphon at the edge and attached it to the membrane of the canister which began to inflate.

Shaxi crouched beside him and set her fingertips on the surface, sending out ripples that touched the rings expanding outward from the seep at the wall. The ripples overlapped and rebounded and continued on. “I think Khamaseen is millennia away from snow. But I think it would be beautiful to see.” She cupped her hands in the water and drank then tipped her head back, letting her wet fingers trail down her throat.

He sucked in a harsh breath.

She glanced over at him. “You said it was plain water.”

He swallowed hard, and he could almost taste the cool clarity. “It is.”

She pushed to her feet. “I’ll take the first canister back. You can wait for the second.” She stalked off without waiting for his reply.

They passed each other twice in silence, carrying water to the converter on the runabout. But the third time, he hustled back before she could leave the pool.

“The converter is full,” he told her. “There’s nothing more we can do but wait until it recharges and the storm dies down.”

She looked down at the canister in her hand. “I’ll take this back to the runabout. In case we need it.”

“We don’t need anything.” He hefted the pack he’d brought. “I have everything here.”

She shifted from one boot to the other. “What do you have?”

“
My
battery is running low.” He knelt next to the pool and began unpacking the containers he’d brought. “Luckily, we can recharge while the runabout does.”

She drifted closer. “What is it?”

“Pixberry cake.”

She stopped. “You brought that from the
Asphodel
.”

“I didn’t bake it on the engine.”

“Why?”

“Because the temperature on an engine isn’t quite right—”

“Why did you bring it?”

“I made it for you.”

Something about the way the words came out and echoed across the still pool—as plain and unadulterated as the water itself—made his pulse stutter. He hadn’t meant it to sound so…true.

“But…” She recoiled slightly, and the toe of one boot dragged a shallow trench in the sand. As if she was making a line she knew she shouldn’t cross. A flush brightened the tactical black of her cheeks: gunmetal blushing. “Why?”

This was the heart of her innocence, he realized. That she would keep asking, no matter how complicated or unpleasant the answer might be. As if, despite her history, she still didn’t believe the universe could be inexplicably cruel. As cruel as he was.

“Because I saw the way you loved them, and I wanted you to…have something you loved.” He shook his head once when she drew another breath. “Don’t ask me why again.” He sounded almost as if he was begging. And he was. “Like an oasis, it just is.”

After a long moment, her eyes blacker than the pool and even more still, she took a step toward him, then another, erasing the line in the sand. She settled beside him and took the container and spoon he held out.

“No ice cream,” he said. “It
is
a desert, after all.”

Tentatively, she smiled. When she took a bite, she closed her eyes and sank onto the yielding verge of sand and lichens, her legs folded under her. He watched her unabashed pleasure and took a steadying breath.

“This is good,” she said. “I would know that even if I didn’t remember cake.”

Heat, gentler than Khamaseen’s atmosphere, flooded his face at her compliment. “My sister taught me. She said, for their own good, all males should know how to bake desserts.”

She opened her eyes and took another bite, watching him. “Is this the older sister you mentioned to Benedetta?”

A lifetime of lies made his jaw clench, holding back words that might reveal him, but it had been so long since he’d shared with anyone. “Her name is Ngaire. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since I left home.”

“If I had a sister, I would never want to lose her.”

Her tone was pensive, not disapproving, but he still felt the sting. Although even if she’d screamed accusations at him, it would’ve been no worse than he deserved. “I…didn’t have a choice.”

She nodded, and her unquestioning acceptance only drove his shame deeper. What she had gone through had not been her choice either, but he should not for a moment aspire to the blameless decency she claimed with every breath.

“I made a mistake,” he told her.

She looked down at the cake. “I told you, it tastes perfect to me.”

“Not with that,” he said roughly. “With you.”

She gave a long, soundless sigh. There was no golden glitter of tech in her eyes, just a dark bewilderment. “Did I not taste good to you?”

And he’d thought the pressure of her hand near his crotch had been impossible to ignore. The yearning in her voice was even worse.

He was an assassin and a spy. He never had to explain himself, and when he did, his words were lies. But the way she asked—with a raw, unfiltered longing that put the quest for truth before her own survival—made him want to answer. With a gullibility he thought had been long scoured from his soul, he wished he could.

But he couldn’t.

At least not with the whole truth. But he owed her, for bringing her into this fight. And for what was to come.

He stared down at the halved berries suspended in the middle of the cake, their tender cores exposed. The sweetness stuck like ash in the back of his throat.

“You tasted perfect to me.” The tightness made his voice hoarse. “I let you go because I didn’t want to use you. I was used once, and…”

Slowly, she lowered her container of cake to the sand and shifted on her haunches to face him. “What happened?”

“I told you my parents were killed by extremists. I’m the one who let them into our house.” He forced himself to meet her startled gaze.

“It was a mistake.” Her tone hovered between a question and a statement.

But he shook his head. “I was a little younger than the twins, and there was a girl… No, she was a woman, but I thought I had a chance with her.” He twisted his lips in a snarling smile. “She led me to believe I had a chance. But all she wanted was the security access to our house. The first night I let her in, she…did everything a boy dreams of. I thought I was in heaven. The second time, she brought the others, and my world—not just my own, small, boy’s world, but the world I lived upon with a hundred million other souls—was ripped apart.”

Shaxi curled one arm around her bent knee, studying him. “That’s why you are so dedicated to keeping the l’auraly twins safe. So they cannot be used to destroy worlds.”

“Whatever I must do,” he said bitterly.