Assassin's Hunger (8 page)

“It’s a bribe,” Torash said bluntly. “Our sister thinks hot running water will make us forget that we’ll never have—”

“Tory!” Alolis’s sharp interruption cut off her sister.

Just when Shaxi was getting interested in what she was saying. “Forget what?” she prodded.

Torash shifted her jaw, as if grinding down the words she wanted to say into chunks small enough to swallow. “That we’re stuck on this hellhole planet instead.”

It didn’t take cyber-embeds to read that lie, but Shaxi let it go. It wasn’t her place to solve the sisters’ problems, she reminded herself. Just keep them alive.

“Since you have no plans,” she said, “perhaps you’ll join my morning routine.”

“Yours seems to involve getting up before dawn.” Alolis burrowed deeper into the pillows. “So, no.”

“It would be something to do,” Shaxi pointed out. “Especially since I suspect the captain will be reluctant to let you off the ship until he forgets the outing yesterday.”

Alolis sighed and Torash muttered something rude under her breath, but they both looked at her.

Shaxi headed for the door. “Get dressed for the day and meet me in the mess hall.”

She didn’t doubt she’d be waiting for a while so she thought she’d have something to eat. Though she’d already consumed another RTE in her bunk, it seemed her stomach had remembered it liked being full. Even the raw edges of her severed links to Hermitaj somehow felt smoother, as if the food and rest had eased all her parts.

Except for the part that had dreamed.

No, she wasn’t going to think about that. But somehow she wasn’t surprised when she entered the mess and found
him
preparing a decidedly not RTE meal. Her stomach rumbled at the scent of real protein and what she guessed was an unnecessary amount of fat.

She stepped closer and watched him put a second small square of a rich yellow substance in a pan over a heating element. The smell that arose along with the sizzle made her mouth water.

“Butter,” he said.

“What?”

“Your eyes turned that color. I assumed you were running a search to figure out what it was. It’s butter.”

“My mother made this.” The words blurted out of her, forced by the sudden, silent explosion of memory. She tried to gather the fragments of that long-ago morning, but unfortunately, as with any explosion, most of what remained was shock and shards. Her hands tightened at her sides, but the memory slipped away.

“Scrambles are popular with mothers throughout the sheerways because you can put whatever you have in them.” He stirred a bowl of something and dumped that into the pan. His movements were as precise and sparing as when he’d hustled the twins out of the cantina. “Do you remember her name?”

She shook her head. “Mama. That’s all she was to me.”

“A popular name with mothers throughout the sheerways.” He gave her a small, lopsided smile. “If she browned the butter of your scrambles, then her reasons for giving you up to Hermitaj must have been desperate.”

She frowned down into the disarray of ingredients he’d upended in the pan. Did the reasons matter? A mother had sold her child to a mercenary corporation, to be made into a thing half machine and all alone. Could there be any cause that would justify such an action?

Never would she have thought to ask such questions when the Hermitaj coding was in place. And she wasn’t particularly sure she wanted to ask it now.

She glanced up and found Eril watching her even while his clever hands stirred and added small black flakes and white crystals—salt and pepper, her implant helpfully identified. The mixture was starting to come together and the fingers of her non-implanted hand twitched on the counter near the spoons.

“There’s a bowl of pixberries in the cooler. Previously frozen, but better than nothing. Grab that and bring it to the table.”

She followed his orders, just as she followed all orders. By the time she found the purplish spheres in the big cooler and returned, he’d arranged two place settings at a small banquette near the bulkhead screen that showed an image of the empty hangar outside.

She glanced around. “Will none of the rest of the crew be eating?”

He shrugged. “They come and go, so I try to stock things that can be easily repurposed. The
Asphodel
runs on a much looser schedule than you’re used to.” He sat and gestured for her to do the same.

Still thinking, she sat across from him and picked up a spoon. “The ship’s itinerary and manifest don’t offer much detail about its purpose.”

“And that says a lot in itself, don’t you think?”

She ate the food on her plate and sat back with a handful of berries. They were still half-frozen and crunchy in the middle, bursting between her teeth with the flavor of light and water from some far-away planet. Or some long-ago time. She realized her eyes had drifted closed again, and with a sigh she looked up to stare at Eril. “So?”

He poured some of the berries onto his plate and ate them with a fork, the tines hitting the frozen cores with a tiny click. For some reason, the civility of it bothered her. “Why do you think I’ll tell you if the captain hasn’t?”

“You recruited me for a reason,” she said. “I assume you wanted an ally.”

She didn’t need implants to catch his hesitation this time. She’d startled him.

He matched her relaxed pose in his chair, both of them lying. “You have more of your brain left than I’d’ve guessed Hermitaj would keep intact.”

“Oh, I’m broken,” she assured him. “Maybe you’re just not as clever as you think.”

For the first time she saw actual humor in his smile. “Now I am wounded.”

She took another handful of berries, deliberately digging her fingers into the bowl. “Since I lost Hermitaj…” She contemplated for a moment and then revised. “When I was taken into Hermitaj, I realized everyone is broken, somehow.” She flicked a berry into the air with one hand and plucked it delicately out of the air with her cyber-enhanced reflexes without crushing the delicate fruit. “We can pretend, but we are only disguising the cracks, not fixing them.”

He grunted. “Were you always a philosopher, or was that encoded?”

“I’ll never know.” She glanced past him to the twins who were crowding through the doorway. “Feed them something light, then send them down to the club room. Tell them it’s a surprise.”

“You are full of surprises,” he murmured.

She didn’t answer, only rose to greet the girls and told them to come find her after they ate.

She didn’t have long to catalog the equipment provided in the club room, but it was all quality gear. As she’d expected after noting the physiques of the captain and Jorr and especially Eril, who, for a supply clerk, was unusually well kept. When the girls arrived with Eril in tow, Shaxi had already lined up the equipment she wanted.

She glanced over at Eril. He really
was
well kept. For as tall and strong as he was, he moved with grace, letting the girls drift ahead of him as he lounged in the doorway, the missing parts of his tattoo hidden where his shoulder pressed into the bulkhead.

“You said it was a surprise,” he said to her. “I got curious.”

Alolis eyed the punch pads and body armor. “Am I going to become a mercenary too?”

“That’s to protect me,” Shaxi said, “while you try to defend yourselves.”

Torash sneered. “We have our own ways of ending an attack.” She angled away from her sister when Alolis touched her elbow to silence her.

Shaxi squelched her own curiosity. “Don’t tell me what you think you can do, let me see it in action. Because I don’t believe you could have stopped those men yesterday from taking you.”

Torash looked aside, her features twisted with dismay, while Alolis’s face paled.

Eril raised his hand, one long finger extended. “While I’m sure this would be interesting to watch, Benedetta might not approve of you attacking her sisters.”

Shaxi cut him off with a direct stare. “She hired me to keep her sisters safe, so I’ll do what I have to.”

Alolis let out a soft, whistling breath, almost a whine. “I just got up. I don’t want—”

Shaxi refocused her stare from Eril to the girl. “You think I wanted to be taken from my home when I was only a third your age? You have a chance here, and a choice. Or do you want to leave that in someone else’s hands? Mine? Your sister’s? Those men who wanted you so badly they shot at the fellows they’d been drinking with not a second before? You think they will give you a chance or a choice?”

Her own vehemence shocked her. Maybe it was just the memory of how vulnerable they’d been, their pretty pink robes flipped to gray as they’d been forced to flee, which was still better than the scarlet and char of a hazer burn. Or a brutal rape.

In the simmering silence, Eril stepped forward. “Shaxi, it’s not your place to frighten them.”

She faced him, her pulse rate ticking up at the confrontation. “I just made it mine.” Why would he argue? He had the body and moves of a fighter, even though he pretended to be something simpler. She lifted her chin. “Take your dissent to the captain.”

“No, don’t,” Torash said. “Corso has told us before that the
Asphodel
’s freedom comes at a price. I’d like to know the value of this coin. Let us change into proper clothes, and at least braid our hair.”

But Shaxi shook her head. “The attack, when it comes, won’t be fair. Maybe you’ll be in your night robes, or with a full belly, or already hurt.” She glanced at Alolis. “Or sleepy. You need to be ready, whatever happens.”

Though she kept her attention on the girls while she donned the safety gear and explained how they should come at her vulnerable points, she was perfectly aware of the hard set of Eril’s jaw. She hadn’t anticipated the depth of his displeasure. He’d seemed at ease with endorsing her to Benedetta after seeing her fight. Or did he think pretty, young girls shouldn’t sully themselves with violence?

As if the universe would give them a pass.

She went through one round with the surprisingly fierce Torash, who attacked with knees and hand chops and piercing screams. When she looked up again while Alolis stepped in front of her, Eril was gone.

Off to tattle to the captain? Fine, she’d set
him
straight too. And Benedetta as well, if the older sister complained. Who walked around a sheership barefoot anyway?

She lunged at Alolis with her hands in threatening claws. The girl shrieked, much less convincingly than her sister, and batted at Shaxi half-heartedly. Shaxi gritted her teeth in a cruel grin she knew the girl could see through the the thin, transparent molding of her protective faceplate and clamped her hands around the girl’s neck.

Alolis’s eyes widened and then slitted as she brought her fists up inside the circle of Shaxi’s arms, ready to break her hold.

Then the screen on the club room wall lit up in a white flare and the
Asphodel
rocked at the fiery blast.

Chapter 6

Eril abandoned his battle station without a second thought and raced for the club room. He was almost bowled off his feet by Shaxi, the girls in tow behind her.

She spared him a quick glance. “Get to your post!”

Of course she had everyone’s duties memorized already. He ignored her and followed them to the twins’ suite which was their assigned location when the ship was under threat of any sort.

Alolis stared around wildly. “What’s happening?”

Shaxi never slowed but she raised her voice over the squall of the ship’s alarm. “Plasma charge. Not of significant force to pierce the hull.”

No, it wouldn’t be, Eril thought grimly. Not when they’d want the twins alive.

“It
felt
significant,” Torash said. She slapped her hand over the lock plate on the suite, and the door slid open. Her sister slipped through before the door was fully open, but Torash lingered a moment.

Her gaze jumped between him and Shaxi, pupils blown wide in fear or excitement or both. “What can I do to help?”

He should break her neck now and then Alolis’s, quick and painless. Which was kinder than what their attackers would have in mind. According to the underwriters, reverse engineering the powers of the qva’avaq would demand brutally invasive testing, probably for years, before the remaining crystal was extracted from their bodies, with fatal results.

Chance or choice, Shaxi had said.

The poor girls had never had either. He flexed his hands, which felt strangely stiff.

“Stay out of the way,” Shaxi said.

For a second, he thought she was talking to him, and his heartbeat raced. How had she—?

But she was looking at Torash. “One bout doesn’t make you a fighter. Maybe next time. If you keep practicing.”

To his shock, she smiled. He doubted Hermitaj had ever given its conscripts reason to smile, but she did it as brightly as the double suns above Khamaseen’s endless dust. As if the light had been there the whole time, waiting to shine. It transformed the harsh angles of her face. Not pretty, by no stretch of the most imaginative simulation. But strangely captivating, nonetheless, and something in him yearned to creep out of the shadows and bask in the reflected glow.