Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (18 page)

“Where’s Haoun going to park while he’s waiting for us?”

“They’ve got some complicated orbital system worked out. When we all get our business done, we contact him and he’ll apply for another docking window. Then we’d better get on the ship during that window or we’ll be left behind.”

“What’s the fine for overstaying your time slot?” Vezali asked.

“We can’t afford it,” Mykah promised. “So don’t shut your comms off. When we get the word it’s time to fly, we’re going.”

The elevator slowed and eased itself down the last hundred meters. Raena’s ears popped as the pressure changed. More guards stood outside the elevator doors, facing another vestibule. Beyond yet another pair of blast doors, more guards surrounded a waiting area crowded with people hanging around until their appointments to leave.

Raena didn’t like the look of that. If anyone found out Mellix was leaving, that waiting area would be the last opportunity to stop him. Unless, of course, they planned to take the entire elevator down. If people were that serious, there wasn’t a lot she could do about it.

A sparking force field marked a walkway through the crowd. The fence would make you jump if you stumbled into it, but it wouldn’t slow down a determined stampede. Raena counted eight guards, or roughly one for every five people waiting. The space was too tight for weapons that required accuracy to function. Raena glanced upward, expecting to see shock nets, but the ceiling was featureless except for inset light panels.

The crowd shifted enough that she caught a solid glimpse of one of the guards. He balanced on a short pedestal, not much more than a box. That meant that the floor was hot. They’d use it to pacify the rabble when the riot came.

She’d seen Mykah and Coni flying above the crowd in the casino on Kai, but she didn’t know if Vezali could jump. Avoiding the first jolt would only leave you standing for the guards’ hand weapons to bring you down. A puzzle, she thought.

“How long are we likely to be on the station, Captain?” she asked.

“We’re aiming for a standard day, so nobody has to pay for accommodations in the City. We’ll see if they really let us out of here that quickly.”

As they explored Capital City, Raena walked on the outside of the passageway for a while. That way Coni could be closer to the displays as she window-shopped for Haoun’s souvenirs. The tchotchkes didn’t call to Raena, since she didn’t recognize what most of them were.

Instead she watched the people. Their variety was breathtaking: feathers, fur, scales, all variety of clothing or lack thereof. The first time someone crossed to the other side of the passage to avoid her, she didn’t think anything of it. By the fifth or sixth time, she started experimenting. Once she even took a half step toward someone, just to watch him skip backward like a startled cat.

“Don’t start a fight,” Coni scolded quietly.

“Not trying to, “ Raena admitted. “Just making sure I saw what I thought I saw.”

“You’re really seeing it. Welcome to the galaxy-at-large.”

Even humans have rights, Raena thought. She hadn’t realized how tolerant the crew of the
Veracity
was. And how much more she should have appreciated them.

Coni consulted her handheld and turned down an alley that looked like all the others to Raena. It was quieter here. A variety of spas lined both sides of the passage, but business seemed to be slow as people conserved their money for food and lodging—and passage off Capital City, if they could find it.

Coni halted in front of a storefront that looked polished and sterile as an operating room. “Ready?”

“Let’s get it over.” Raena pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The medical robot grasped Raena’s chin in one claw and turned her face gently from side to side, examining her skin in a variety of spectrums so it could see through her paint job.

“Yes, we can erase that scar without damaging your eye. Looks like you’ve lived with it a long time, though. It would have been easier to repair when the wound was fresh.”

“I was stuck shipboard,” Raena said, “until I could save the money up.”

Coni was impressed by the ease with which the lie left the little woman’s lips. She didn’t know where Raena had gotten the scar that nearly cost her an eye, but it predated her induction into Imperial service. Receiving that scar was one story she hadn’t told Jain Thallian.

Coni was still surprised that Raena had asked her to accompany her to the plastic surgeon. The little woman generally seemed so self-assured that Coni wasn’t sure what about this process made Raena anxious.

The robot led Raena toward a door back into the salon. Coni followed along. Raena cast a glance over her shoulder that Coni read as gratitude.

A Shtrell nurse trotted up to intercept the big blue-furred girl. “You don’t need to accompany your friend …”

Coni cut her off before she could insult her with a menu of treatments. “We’ve already run into some anti-humanism since we landed here.” Coni kept moving forward. Raena loitered to give her time to catch up. “I know that won’t be a problem
here
,” Coni said, injecting emphasis, “but my friend was badly frightened. She’ll be more comfortable if I stay with her.”

The Shtrell shrugged, ruffling her feathers. “You’ll need to stay out of the doctor’s way.”

“Of course,” Coni agreed. She took the hand Raena held out to her, gave it a gentle squeeze. She wondered at herself, acting like Raena’s friend. Strangely enough, she—and the rest of the
Veracity
’s crew—seemed to be the only friends Raena had, other than Ariel Shaad. Maybe it wasn’t such an act.

Raena let herself be strapped into a complicated frame that would restrain her completely from the shoulders up. It reminded her of a telenovel she and Ariel watched as teenagers: people were always changing their faces, coming back into their lives as someone new whenever different actors took over the roles.

Bounty hunters had marked her. Thallian had remodeled her to reflect his dominance. The scar between her eyes predated all the others. It was the first scar, the primal one that had changed her the most. She’d thought she would never let it go, but it had—more than anything else, more than her DNA itself—trapped her in the past, tied her to the person she no longer wanted to be. The time had come to let it go.

Raena watched the nurses smooth her hair back from her face and secure it under a soft turban that stretched around her skull.

A stout little nurse that reminded her of Vezali—because she had tentacles, not hands—succeeded in distracting her while another rubbed numbing cream across her forehead and over her eyelid. No wonder they hadn’t wanted Coni to see this part: it felt scary. Raena felt her eyelid drooping slackly over her eye. She could no longer blink.

The birdlike nurse came toward her with a mask full of anesthetic. Locked into the head frame, Raena couldn’t pull away. One breath of that stuff knocked her out.

It was easy to remember when she got the scar. She’d been young—four, maybe, probably not as much as five. Her mother had been having a nightmare. A scream choked behind Fiana’s teeth had woken Raena.

Raena stood at her mother’s bedside, frightened, uncertain what to do. Fiana writhed on her pallet, breathing raggedly. Raena whispered, “Mama? Wake up,” but Fiana didn’t seem to hear.

“Mama?” she called a little louder. She was afraid to wake the others in the shelter, but they couldn’t afford to be thrown out. Her mother had said they had nowhere else to go.

Raena saw the scream rising in her mother’s chest. Lunging forward, she cupped her hand over Fiana’s mouth.

Her mother woke instantly. One hand flashed upward to shove Raena away. There was something sharp in it: a broken cup, the raw ceramic edge like a knife.

Raena didn’t feel the pain at first. Instead, she felt hot wetness spill into her eye. The blood blurred her vision and she started to cry. It stung.

“Hush, you idiot.” The broken cup fell from Fiana’s hand, forgotten. “What did you do?”

Fiana dug into her pack for a clean shirt. She pressed Raena’s hand over the fabric to hold it in place while she pulled out the staple gun. When she prodded her daughter’s forehead with a finger, she set the gun aside. “This is going to have to be done by hand,” Fiana grumbled. “Why can’t you be more careful?”

Raena said nothing.

“Honestly,” Fiana hissed. She pulled out the sewing kit and her headlamp. “Come lie in my lap,” she directed, patting her thigh. “Put your head here.”

Raena did as she was told, still clutching the shirt to her face. It had grown soggy and chilled in her fingers.

Fiana eased the shirt away from the wound. She pressed a dry corner over Raena’s eyelid and sprayed her forehead with something icy. Then she mopped the blood away.

“Hold this for me,” Fiana ordered. She thrust a mirror into Raena’s hand. “Watch this.” Raena saw her own reflection, scared, young, smeared with drying blood.

“You nearly lost an eye,” Fiana said. “You’re lucky.” She forced the edges of the wound apart to clean them. Raena caught a queasy glimpse of something that made her think of cheese, yellowy white in the light of her mother’s headlamp.

“That’s what you are,” Fiana said. “Just bones. You are dead. We all are. We’re all dead and we don’t have the sense to lie down and stop moving. That’s what they’d like us to do. They’d like all humans to lie down and be dead. They’d like to grind us up and feed us to their young.”

Fiana pinched the edges of the wound back together and jammed the needle through them. Raena winced, more from the sight of it than because it hurt. Whatever the numbing spray was, it worked well.

Fiana slapped her. “Don’t you move,” she whispered. “This is hard enough to do as it is. You watch what I’m doing so you can do it yourself next time and you won’t have to wake me up.”

So Raena lay perfectly still and watched her mother’s hands. She disassociated herself from the sight and did not make a sound.

It wasn’t the last wound Fiana gave her, but it was the last her mother patched for her.

Raena focused her thoughts outward again with a shuddering breath. The medical robot tilted a mirror for her. “What do you think? Good as new?”

Raena gazed at her reflection and saw someone she had never seen before. Her forehead was smoothed now. They’d replanted her eyebrow to cover the new skin. Above the cheekbones, her face was now symmetrical and even. She looked, she thought, more like Eilif than herself.

“It’s perfect,” Coni said from where she stood against the wall. “Are you happy?”

Raena smiled at her, grateful that the blue girl had stood vigil through the procedure. “It’s exactly what I wanted. Thank you.”

The tentacled nurse unfastened the restraints and helped Raena to her feet. “Since you paid in advance, you’re all set.”

Raena nodded. She wondered if the new flesh would begin to hurt once the anesthetic wore off. She wondered if she would have anything left to remind her of her mother, since she’d given the hologram medallion to Ariel.

She wasn’t sure if her reflexes would be shaky after being knocked out, but everyone seemed to be busy resetting the surgery suite or chatting with Coni. She pulled her bulky coat on with a flourish, slipping the pouch of anesthetic into a pocket set inside her left sleeve.

Coni waited until they’d gotten several blocks away before she asked, “Why did you have to steal something from them?”

Raena gave her a slight smile. “Lots of reasons. Primarily because if we buy anything like this, there will be a paper trail. And questions. I don’t know if it will be safe for Mellix, but we know it’s safe for humans. If he can’t use it, it may help me rest when I can’t sleep. But mostly because I wanted to see if I still could. I survived for a lot of years by taking opportunities when I saw them.”

Coni stared at her. “What if you’d been caught?”

“I’ve seen you break into office buildings on Kai to disrupt a corporate treasure hunt simply because you were bored. I know you can improvise an escape.”

“I’m serious, Raena. It was a stupid risk to take. You’ve seen how they feel about humans here.”

Perspective shifted for Raena and she understood that Coni was not upset by the illegality of the theft, but about the way it would reflect on all humans.

“I don’t represent my whole species,” Raena promised. “Most humans can’t do what I do.”

“Mykah would be the first to tell you that you can’t afford to think like that.” Coni didn’t glance in Raena’s direction as she said it. “No one here sees you as an individual. They only see you as a representative. That’s why the galaxy is so obsessed with Thallian. His crimes weren’t his alone. They reflect on all humanity.”

“All right,” Raena conceded. “I will be cautious. But you didn’t bring me along on this adventure to behave. I’m here because I have a skill set none of the rest of you possesses. Still, I promise to do my best to see that none of us are shamed in the process.”

Coni watched Raena surreptitiously reach into the collar of her sweater. What was she doing now? Coni watched Raena’s shoulders relax for a moment. Then they reset, her posture straightening like a soldier’s once more. What had she done?

Ah. Coni remembered when they’d landed on the Thallian homeworld and found Raena bleeding heavily from the wound in her shoulder. Thallian had apparently shot her with a shock capsule. Now Raena was touching her scarred shoulder superstitiously, reaffirming her own identity. Coni realized that Raena had checked to make sure her other scars were still in place.

Coni had known about humans since her childhood. She remembered learning about the trials and the containment camps on the news. Most of all, she remembered the dirty, ragged refugee children, who had taken no part in the Empire but still suffered for its crimes. She had wanted to help humans since those images had burned themselves into her eyes.

But, she realized at last, she didn’t know how to help Raena at all. She could give her a new life. She could give her a new identity. But she couldn’t erase her past and heal the places where she was broken. Watching Raena touch her scars to comfort herself, Coni realized finally that the past, however painful it might have been, was as hard for humans to let go of as it was for everyone else.