Blood Will Tell (19 page)

At the time he’d just dug his toe in the ground and heaved an exaggerated sigh. She was never going to let him live that down. Just because he and his friend Mikhal had gotten a hold of some rescue flares from Mikhal’s stepdad’s boat and shot them off inside the garbage compactor behind the house didn’t mean he’d actually blown it up. True, the outer wall of the compactor had become positively convex, but it wasn’t as if they’d exploded it or anything. But his mother had reacted as if he’d set off the flares inside the house instead of safely outside.

Adults tended to overreact about the strangest things, he and Mikhal had agreed, but their parents had gotten together and made them consent to a mutual non-explosion pact, so that particular avenue of recreation had been cut off. He could probably have gotten Risa or Els-E to take him to the park or over to Mikhal’s or Alic’s house, but none of those ordinary amusements seemed particularly appealing to him right now.

He sat on top of the fort he and the other two boys had built in his mother’s expansive backyard—the biggest yard in the neighborhood, a neighborhood unusual for Rilsport because it had real houses with real yards, instead of apartments or townhouses stacked on top of each other. From his perch he could just see past the lacy blue-green trees that edged the property and all the way down to the harbor. The sky was a pale delicate turquoise, streaked with feathery clouds, and the air smelled sweet and warm. He should have been off exploring with Mikhal and Alic, or riding his bike, or...something. Instead he sat here, kicking his heels against the synth-wood of the fort and thinking, which wasn’t something he normally did a lot of. He’d always been more the action type.

His mother had been gone for three days now, which according to her was only enough time to get to Iradia and start on the security project. She hadn’t gone into any details, not that Jerem had expected she would. Computers bored him, and he could never understand her fascination with them, or the way she could spend hours staring into a screen, her silences punctuated by staccato bursts of rapid-fire typing. He’d once complained of how dull the machines were, to which she’d only replied, “Why does that not surprise me?” and given him a rueful grin.

But because he knew very little about what her job entailed, it was hard for him to visualize exactly what could keep her busy for so long on Iradia. The very fact that she’d gone there at all puzzled him a bit. She’d been born there, but she didn’t like to discuss the fact, and she’d always admonished him not to talk about it with anyone else. Jerem never could figure out what the big deal was, but because it was obviously important to her he had kept the secret. Iradia wasn’t really a place to be proud of, he guessed; he’d read about it on the ’net and the UEG (Unabridged Encyclopedia Galactica), and it sounded like a hot, dry, dusty slagheap populated by crime lords and lots of other unsavory types. No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it.

The other thing she simply wouldn’t talk about was his father. Oh, she’d given Jerem one or two tiny details, mostly to get him to stop pestering her, so he knew his father had been a pilot with the GDF and had died in the fighting in the siege of Arlinais against the Stacians. Mia called Jerem’s father a hero, but she said very little else about him. The lack of a father had never bothered Jerem particularly. His father had died before he was born, after all, and it was difficult to miss someone you’d never known. What did bother him was the complete lack of any evidence of his father’s existence. Some of the other boys’ fathers were also dead, or just gone—Mikhal’s real father had died on Nylos in a mine collapse, and Petyr’s father just decided one day he’d had enough and had moved away to New Chicago. Mia said that was half of Petyr’s problem right there, not having a dad, but why it should be a problem for Petyr and not for Jerem, when he didn’t have a father, either, she’d never satisfactorily explained. But at least the other boys had pictures of their fathers, and Petyr even went to stay with his dad once or twice a year.

Jerem had nothing. He could only guess at his own missing parent’s appearance because he had decided early on that his dead father must have looked like him. Certainly Jerem, with his wavy dark hair, deep olive skin, and brown eyes, looked nothing like his mother. She had warm red hair that fell straight down her back when she didn’t wear it up, and her eyes were an unusual mixture of gray and green and amber—definitely not brown.

When he’d asked Risa why his mother would travel so far to take on a commission, Risa had laughed and said, “Because they’re paying her a lot of money, that’s why. You like your nice big house with your nice big yard? Well, none of that’s free, you know.”

Jerem had wanted to retort that of course he knew that, he wasn’t a
baby
, but since he liked Risa most of the time he didn’t feel like arguing with her. There was a big hole in her argument, anyway—Jerem and Mia had always lived in this house, even while she was still going to the university, and obviously that was before she had started Felaris Security Systems and began making all this money off commissions. How a college student, especially one from as poor a planet as Iradia, could have afforded a place like this had also never been explained to his satisfaction.

His life was like that, full of little inconsistencies and questions that weren’t supposed to be asked. Jerem knew he didn’t have much cause for complaint, because it was certainly a pretty nice life as far as he could tell, except for school maybe. And even that wasn’t so bad, because all his friends had to go, too, so at least they were all stuck there together.

In an odd way it was sort of reassuring to know that his father had been a pilot, even though Jerem had thought to himself once or twice that he couldn’t have been that great a pilot, or he wouldn’t have gotten shot down over Arlinais. Of course he knew better than to mention these traitorous thoughts to his mother. Still, maybe his father’s flying skills could explain why Jerem was able to hit the plastic targets Mikhal set up on top of the fort ten times out of ten (he missed only every once in a great while, and then usually because Mikhal had done something to distract him), or the way Jerem could eyeball the distance between himself and any other object and guess it down to the tenth of a meter, or—well, there were lots of things like that. If nothing else, his uncanny motor skills guaranteed that he was always chosen first for the pulseball games at school.

Jerem knew he hadn’t inherited any of that from his mother—she was still slender and trim, but probably because she worked out for an hour in the home gym five days a week and spent the rest of the time she wasn’t at work chasing after him. She certainly didn’t care much for sports or other physical activities, things that seemed to come to Jerem as easily as breathing.

Scowling at the glittering harbor, Jerem hefted a rock—left on the fort’s roof from one of his previous target-practice sessions—and threw it at the border of mothlace trees at the edge of the property. As he had predicted, the rock cleanly sliced through the slender branch at which he had been aiming, and the whole piece fell off and onto the grass below. Once he had thrown the rock, he felt a little guilty about the damage he had caused, but he tried to excuse it by telling himself the gardeners would have trimmed it back soon anyway.

With a sigh, he launched himself off the roof of the fort in a perfect arc, hitting the ground rolling and then bouncing straight up into a standing position. His mother probably would have given him what-for if she’d seen him pull that particular stunt. But he’d done it dozens of times before, and since she wasn’t here to scold him, he just brushed off the knees of his pants and wandered back inside. Maybe he might as well go over to Mikhal’s house after all.

As he switched on the comm and punched in Mik’s number, Jerem wondered idly whether his mother was as bored as he was.

Miala swallowed, then thought despairingly,
I’m going to die here...and my son will never know what happened to me. He’ll think I abandoned him.

The Stacian continued to glare at her, even as his fingers ground into her jaw. She knew her face would be bruised later...if there even
were
a “later.”

She knew that any answer she gave him would be the wrong one, and she certainly wasn’t about to tell him the truth. That money was hers, rightfully taken in payment for her father’s blood, for the man who hadn’t lived to see his grandson because of Mast’s perfidy. Some of it had been spent while she went to school, but she had earned a great deal back over the past few years, and a majority of the funds were still intact. That didn’t even count Thorn’s share, of course. His portion of the money she had deposited in a bank on New Chicago, where it had steadily gathered interest over the intervening eight years.

So she glanced up at the Stacian with as guileless a look as she could manage and said, “I don’t know where the money is.”

“Wrong answer,” he replied immediately, and his fingers moved from her jaw down to her throat, pressing on the delicate skin there, squeezing down on her windpipe.

“I swear I don’t know!” she gasped, desperately trying to draw enough air into her lungs to choke out a protest. “I don’t know why you think I have it!”

The pressure on her throat eased the tiniest fraction. “Because,” Murgan said softly, bending his braid-crowned head toward hers, “it was your father who installed Mast’s security system. Because the last trace of you in Aldis Nova was a report submitted to the local garrison regarding your missing father. Because rumor states that you were nearly as good a hacker as he. Who else could have taken it?”

“Anyone,” Miala wheezed. “The place was wide open after Mast was killed. Anyone could have come in here and gotten the treasure.”

“‘Anyone’? Does that include Rast Darlester, whose transport was mysteriously destroyed by unknown defenders in this very compound, days after Mast was killed?”

Well, no matter what else she could say about him, Murgan obviously had damn good intelligence. She’d almost forgotten about Darlester. But his destruction was his own fault. If he hadn’t come poking and prying, then she and Thorn wouldn’t have been forced to defend themselves.

But obviously she couldn’t admit to any of that, so instead she only said, in a choked whisper, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Quite a few protestations of ignorance from a woman who’s supposed to be a genius,” commented Murgan. “Here’s an easy one, then. If you didn’t take the treasure, how did you get off Iradia in the first place? Everyone in Aldis Nova said you and your father were dirt-poor.”

“It’s not that hard to hitch a ride if you’re friendly enough,” she replied, and gave a small hiccupping laugh, all she could manage with Murgan’s hand on her throat. The lie wasn’t that far from the truth anyway. She and Thorn certainly had had a much closer relationship than merely as business partners.

The Stacian’s eyes narrowed, but whether in scorn or simply disgust, Miala couldn’t be sure. Not that she cared what he thought of her.

But then the pressure on her throat intensified once more, even as Murgan said, “I think you’re lying. The truth, before you die.”

A reddish mist swam up before Miala’s eyes, even as the room seemed to grow steadily dimmer. Desperately she brought her hands up to claw at Murgan’s ever-tightening fingers, but the Stacian might have been made out of steel for all the difference her feeble attempts made.

“She can’t tell you anything if she’s dead.”

That voice. She knew it—and had never thought to hear it again. It had the slightest rough edge, contrasted with a faint singsong intonation that she hadn’t heard from anyone else. Eryk Thorn’s voice.

Miala knew better than to turn and look for him in the crowd that had stood watching as Murgan throttled her, but her hands dropped suddenly to her side as she felt the Stacian release his hold ever so slightly.

“No one asked for your opinion, mercenary,” Murgan rasped.

“I’m giving it anyway.”

Apparently nonplussed, Murgan scowled, then suddenly let go of Miala’s throat. She gasped, feeling the welcome air rush back into her lungs. It was all she could do to keep from collapsing at the alien’s feet.

The crowd shifted slightly, and for the first time she saw Eryk Thorn. His face was mostly hidden behind wrappings of dark fabric, and instead of the jumpsuit he had worn the last time she’d seen him, he wore robes that seemed to echo the local garb, albeit in shades of dark gray and black. But it was indisputably him.

With an almost physical ache Miala remembered how his arms had felt around her, the slight rasp of his shaven cheek against hers, the strength of his mouth on her lips. All the sensations she thought she had locked away forever seemed to flood her at once, and she quickly glanced down at the floor, afraid that the longing she felt would be plain to all those who looked on her.

“Who’s running things around here, scum?” Murgan demanded. “You, or me?”

“You,” said Thorn, his tone casual. “But she’s no good to you dead, is she?”

The Stacian made a sound like a low growl in his throat. With a sudden, vicious movement he backhanded Miala against the side of her cheek, and she stumbled and fell onto the stone floor. The pain was immediate and shocking, like a white-hot explosion in her flesh. She ground her teeth together, shutting her eyes for a moment.

Don’t cry
.
Whatever you do, don’t let him see you cry...

It was hard for her to focus past the throbbing in her cheek. Through slitted eyes she saw Thorn shift his weight, almost as if he wanted to come forward to help her but knew better than to show her any particular solicitude.

Then Murgan squatted down next to Miala, pushing her disheveled hair out of the way so he could see her face more clearly. “That hurt, didn’t it?” he asked. “I can make you hurt a lot more before I kill you. Perhaps you should think on that for a while.” Moving with ponderous majesty, he stood, hauling Miala upright as he did so.

The room seemed to swim around her, but she blinked vigorously against the pain. After a few seconds she thought that at least she wasn’t going to pass out.