Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (26 page)

“I’m sorry they didn’t,” Mellix said. “She seems as if she’d be a formidable …”

Mykah sent down the knife and stepped away from the vegetables he was preparing to chop. “You don’t need to worry about Raena, Mellix. We have a couple more tools at hand to help her, if they’re necessary. I told you I trust her with my life. She also trusts me with hers. We’ll look after her.”

Something about having Vezali at her side did help Raena sleep. Her body must have needed the time to recuperate from the seizure, but even more, her mind needed the solace of being watched over. She got a good, solid rest before the dreams ate at her again.

Raena remembered the day the transporters hired by her mother had escorted her to the chapter house where Raena was supposed to continue her fight training. They arrived at the correct address, but it was not the haven Raena expected.

Oh, the chapter house had certainly been there. In its place stood a blackened ruin, twisted girders jabbing jaggedly into the sky. The fire had been so long ago that the smell of ashes had dissipated. There was so little left of the building that the fire must have been spectacularly hot.

“That’s just great,” Kendra shouted. “What am I supposed to do with you now?” She pulled out her comm and called Llew back at the ship. “It’s gone,” she ranted. “The whole building’s gone. There’s no place to dump the kid.”

Raena looked at the place where her teachers were supposed to be. The broken girders made her think of a forest in winter, bare trees naked amidst the snow. She’d seen an illustration like that in a children’s story.

She could hear only half the conversation, but she got the sense that Llew calmed Kendra down. The woman’s pacing took on a smaller circuit, slowed, then stopped altogether.

Raena couldn’t have said what she wanted, even if it had occurred to anyone to ask. She didn’t want to go home to her mother, whose behavior had grown increasingly erratic as she’d internalized more of the Humans First! rhetoric. Even a ten-year-old could grasp that things at home had gotten seriously dangerous. If they dragged her back, Raena promised herself that she would run away.

It wasn’t as if she had any other family to which she could go. Raena didn’t know her grandparents’ names or have any clue how to find them—as if they’d be inclined to take in the street-rat that their lunatic child had spawned.

“Come on,” Kendra said harshly, yanking Raena away from the ruins. “Let’s go back to the ship. Llew’s gonna see if he can find where the chapter relocated to.”

But he hadn’t. When she and Kendra arrived back at the docking slip, a pod of Viridians was waiting. Raena didn’t recognize them. She’d led a fairly sheltered life in the strictly human moon colony. Aliens hadn’t been welcome. Incoming news had been heavily censored. She’d known that there were aliens in the galaxy, but she hadn’t actually ever seen any. If she’d known what these were, she would have fled.

The Viridians swarmed around her, measuring and prodding and penning her in. Finally, tired of being poked, she rounded on one.

Another whipped out a length of black cloth that coiled around her wrist and stopped her blow from landing. He yanked her hand back hard and secured it to her side as the others moved in and pinned her free arm. Raena kicked and struggled, but all too soon she was cocooned.

“Stop,” one of them said over a tinny translator, “or we cover your face.”

Raena couldn’t tell them apart. There were six in the pod, ludicrously tall and thin, like scarecrows cobbled together from green sticks.

One tested her compliance by stroking her face with his long knobby fingers. Raena snapped at him, missing his finger by millimeters. Without another word, another Viridian wrapped the fabric over her face.

When the air wouldn’t come, Raena panicked. She thrashed, lungs burning, wondering why they were killing her, what she had done.

When they sliced the binding off of her, she’d been collared and chained in the hold of a Viridian ship. In the dimness, she couldn’t see the limits of the room, but she recognized the misery of all the creatures chained around her. Most of them lay still, curled up as small as they could make themselves, as if they only wanted to disappear. Like all the rest, Raena had been stripped nude, her hands manacled around the chain that held her to the deck.

Near her feet lurked a foul-smelling drain. She hoped that it was meant for waste, not for food. Not that she intended to eat anything onboard this ship. Let the slavers realize their bad investment as she starved herself to death.

Of course, she hadn’t any clue about the torments they would subject her to, in order to get her to eat. She was too young to put up much resistance yet.

Gah. Raena shook herself awake, but her aching limbs were heavy and she slipped back into the dream.

She was lucky that she hadn’t spent more than a couple of weeks on the Viridian ship. It wasn’t really what they did to her that was the worst part, because she learned fairly quickly to comply and keep her head down and thereby escape punishment. They didn’t want to permanently damage their property before they found a buyer for it, so compliance was rewarded with neglect. What scarred her were the things she saw done to the other slaves, the things that some of the slaves did to each other. She shuddered to remember them. With her hands manacled, she had been unable to block her ears.

That journey marked the death of her childhood.

Fighting her way out of the dream again, still groggy, Raena forced herself to sit up. Her limbs felt weighted. As soon as she let herself slump against the bulkhead between her cabin and the passageway, sleep overpowered her again.

Frigid water plummeted from the ceiling, beating Raena to the floor. She felt bruised, even as she forced herself to her feet, shivering, shaking her head to clear the water from her face. The Viridians marched through or over the slaves between her and the door. There was no way she could get away from them, nothing to hide behind, so she stood, black hair hanging damply over her face, wondering what she had done. Once the other creatures around her had been washed, the Viridians took them and they never came back.

The next time she got her eyes forced open, Raena pushed herself to her feet.

“What’s going on?” Vezali asked sleepily.

“Bad dream. It won’t let me go.”

Raena paced her cabin, hoping to get her blood flowing. She splashed some cold water from the tap onto her cheeks. When that didn’t guarantee consciousness, she flung herself into an icy shower. She did not want to go back into that dream.

The gelid water hitting her skin shocked enough adrenaline into her system that she felt awareness finally rushing into place. Shivering, she readjusted the water temperature and let herself indulge in the external warmth until the chill left her flesh.

She did have happy memories, she reminded herself. Chief among them was standing over Thallian’s burning corpse. Then there were the days of running around with Ariel as a teenager, stealing guns from her father’s factory and trading them for drugs. And seeing Kavanaugh again, after he’d opened her tomb. She’d always liked him. There was that final day on Kai, the one day when Ariel and Gavin had gotten along, before Thallian’s men found them. Even some days of her childhood, learning to fight in the street and running across the rooftops and diving in the colony’s deep tank and the first time she walked on the moon’s surface and saw the stars overhead …

And the day she met Mykah and Coni, the day she’d joined them in disrupting the jet pack race, the day she’d learned to soar on makeshift wings. That was one of the best days of her life, too: when she finally envisioned a future for herself, free of Gavin and Ariel and Thallian, free of the Empire and the War and having been a slave. That was the day she began to look forward to life.

She shut the water off and set the heater to dry her body, fluffing her hair on end as she did so. She hoped it was nearly morning now, or something that the crew considered morning, because she was actually hungry. Maybe today she could do justice to Mykah’s specially garnished creations.

Someone tapped on her door. “We’re up,” Raena called as she swam into one of Jain’s sweaters. She heard the scratch of Haoun’s claws as he unlocked the door from the outside.

Some of Vezali’s tentacles flowed to the floor, while others stretched nearly to the ceiling. “Is it morning?”

“I hope so,” Raena said.

Haoun opened the door. “Mykah has cooked up an ‘escape from Capital City’ feast. He offered to send a tray in to you, if you don’t feel comfortable coming out to join us.”

“If I come out, I want someone to be ready with a stun stick, in case I go into a fugue or something.”

“Do you think any of us could take you with a stun stick?” Haoun asked skeptically.

“Sure,” Raena said. “With surprise on your side.”

“I can’t tell if you’re teasing,” Vezali protested, “but since you got a pretty good night’s rest, I don’t think you’re a danger to us. Come out.”

Raena’s smile felt shaky, but she didn’t tell them how grateful she was for their trust.

A sudden thought propelled her across the room. Raena pulled Revan’s coat out of the clothes locker. Inside one of the pockets, she found the stolen pouch of anesthetic.

Relief washed over her. She could still drug herself to sleep.

“What’s that?” Haoun asked.

“I stole it on Capital City. It’s the anesthetic they used on me when they fixed my face.” She handed the pouch to Haoun. “Please use this to sedate me, if I fall asleep in public.”

“If you’re sure …”

“The last thing I want is for any of you to get hurt. Please help me make sure that doesn’t happen.”

He shrugged and tucked the anesthetic into the pouch he wore across his chest.

Mykah had gone all out for his feast. There were flower salads, nut-crusted noodles, some kind of vegetable mélange in a creamy broth, and a whole fish. Mykah had replaced its eyes with dollops of sauce.

Mellix didn’t join them. Mykah said the journalist was hard at work, trying to find a safe haven for himself and his kiisas.

“Who were those guys who attacked Mellix?” Mykah wanted to know. He’d bleached his beard and carved it with channels that ran to the skin, so that dark lines striped his bright facial hair. The marks lined his face like a tiger’s.

“Don’t know,” Raena said. “They were professionals. The rifle I saw up close was state of the art.”

“Station Security?” Haoun wondered. “There were a lot of them, if they expected to escape notice.”

“Somebody was paid not to notice them,” Coni suggested.

“That’s what I thought,” Raena said. “Station Security knew that I was alone with Mellix. They’d checked Vezali’s manifest, so they knew our crates were full of groceries, not weapons. And they would have known Mellix was a pacifist. Therefore a large, well-armed force was overkill for the two of us, especially if they were just going to vent our air and kill us in our sleep.”

“Corporate thugs,” Mykah cursed.

Raena smiled at his tone. “After we got Mellix aboard the
Veracity
, I watched him deal with Capital City’s Security Commander. Mellix had him terrified. Whoever is trying to kill Mellix won’t be frightened away by a little bad press.”

“You think it’s payback for the tesseract announcement?” Vezali asked her.

“I think Mellix probably has a number of enemies. If they aren’t punishing him for something he’s already done, they’re hoping to prevent any more damage to their bottom line. No doubt he has a list of suspects.”

After that announcement, the conversation drifted back to finding work. Their days of hauling food around the galaxy were curtailed until they could get Mellix’s belongings out of the hold, but they weren’t hurting for money now that the network had paid them for his rescue.

Raena listened to her crewmates talk about job prospects without offering any opinions. Many of the projects they debated were media hacks or investigative reporting, and she couldn’t really help them with that anyway.

She wondered if they would voluntarily choose work that would require her skills. The more time she spent listening to them, the more she realized that though she’d met Mykah and Coni in the midst of disrupting an aerial scavenger hunt, they were intellectuals, more comfortable with nebulous questions of media control and influence than with the dirty physical work of solving anything more serious.

At this point, it didn’t really matter to her. Until she was certain she would never again have a seizure and the weird hallucinations had ceased, she didn’t want to be putting her own or anyone else’s life on the line. She was surprised to admit to herself that she was content to simply be along for the ride, just like Haoun. She glanced up at him and smiled, but he was engrossed in the conversation.

Eventually a decision was reached and the voices trailed off. Raena turned outward from her thoughts just before Vezali asked, “Do you have anything to add, Raena?”

Raena shook her head. “Take the work that interests you. That’s the benefit of being free.”

Mellix bustled in at last. “Am I too late for lunch?”

The crew shifted over and Mykah brought another plate.

Raena observed, “You outdid yourself today, Mykah.”

He grinned. “You deserved a feast. Haoun showed us the recording of you fighting off those soldiers. I can’t believe you held them off with a single pistol.”

“I’ve handled Stingers more than any other weapon. I know exactly what they can do. And I had surprise on my side, which counts for a lot in a fight.”

“I notice you didn’t kill them.”

“Mellix said not to.”

Mellix noted, “It would have been easier to kill them.”

“It’s always easier to kill,” Raena agreed. “Do you have any idea who those guys were?”

Mellix heaped his plate with noodles. “Haoun tells me the
Veracity
’s cameras are too old to get really clear resolution, so I didn’t get a good close look at any of them. Did you see any insignia?”