Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (29 page)

She looked up out of her thoughts to see Mykah’s expression. He stared at her as if calculating whether he could get out of her cabin before she could kill him. He didn’t seem to like his odds.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It is crazy. I know it is. I’m grasping at straws, desperate to get out from under these nightmares.” She slid across her bunk to get her back against the wall, wrapped her arms around her knees, and tried to look even smaller and less threatening than she usually did. “Haoun told me you were meeting with Kavanaugh tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Tarik grew up on a tramp medical ship, working for the Coalition during the War. He’s a good man. He’ll help sort me out or he’ll help you get me committed.”

“Okay.” Mykah walked over to the door at an angle that allowed him to keep from turning his back on her.

Raena didn’t move. She couldn’t think of anything she could say that wouldn’t terrify him even worse.

Once she was alone again, she settled in to think back through all her dreams. She’d recognized as she dreamed them that the Gavins were too old to be the appropriate age for the memories they had invaded. Had there been a logical progression to his aging?

If so, what did that tell her?

Raena turned on her terminal and opened the file she was using as her log. Time to go back over her notes with special emphasis on Gavin.

He hadn’t shown up at all in several of her dreams: the ones where the Templar didn’t die out and the one with the wholly human crew of the
Veracity/Raptor
—and the one where Jain Thallian was going to kill her in the escape pod. But the other dreams, starting with the one of being drugged in the souk and carried away—had Gavin seemed older than he should have there as well?

She decided it didn’t matter if he was coming backward from the future—her future—to mess with her. It didn’t matter if she believed he was really time traveling or not, or whether she believed in time travel at all. All that truly mattered now was that she’d found something harmless she could obsess over to pass the time, to fill her mind, until sleep overtook her again.

If she didn’t have something to occupy her thoughts, she understood, her mind was going to tear itself apart.

The deeper she looked into her log, the more evidence she accrued. Yes, there was a progression in Sloane’s appearance in her dreams. He’d seemed only subtly older in the initial dream, the one with the two Gavins. From then on, his hair had fallen out, his face had grown more wrinkled, and his beard had become more and more unkempt. But if Gavin really was attacking her dreams, placing himself into her past, why wasn’t he controlling how he appeared to her?

She lost track of time until Haoun commed her to say that they were about to land on Tengri. She slipped into the crash webbing and waited for sleep to overpower her, but it chose not to.

Not too much later, Mykah opened the door, but stayed in the hallway where he could slam his fist on the door control and lock her in, if she made any threatening moves. Raena stayed seated at her desk and didn’t even think about all the ways she could overpower him.

“We’re on Tengri,” he said. “I’m going to take Coni out on the town, then we’ll meet up with Kavanaugh. Haoun and Vezali are already gone. I came by to see if you wanted anything before I lock you in.”

“Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” She lifted the still-unopened bottle of cider from her desk.

Mykah lingered there a moment, seeming to have more to say. Raena helped him out. “I’m sorry if I frightened you earlier.”

“It’s all right. It’s just … I located the Doze gas the Thallians had tucked away to use on you, if they’d succeeded in taking you prisoner. They’d even calculated the dosage for you. I want you to check their figures for me. I don’t want to give you too much.”

“Did you send the calculation back to me?”

He nodded.

“I’ll look it over, but I hope we won’t need to go that far.”

“I hope so, too.”

Raena gazed at him.
Just a kid
, she thought,
and I am a lot of responsibility
. “Mykah … not that you need it, but you have my permission to do anything you have to, in order to keep the crew safe.”

He nodded. “Have a good evening.”

“You, too.”

Once she was sure they were gone, she retrieved the anesthetic Haoun had left on her desk. It was probably extremely dangerous to use it without any supervision. No doubt she would regret it later, but claustrophobia had crept up on her again. She knew she was trapped in her cabin because she had asked to be—and really, everyone was safer because of it—but she wanted a way to skip ahead in time. The anesthetic wouldn’t do that, but it would blot her out of the here and now.

She retrieved the breather and the nebulizer from the locker where she’d put them. Then she retreated to her bunk, where she arranged herself so that when the drug took effect, the weight of the nebulizer would pull the mask away from her face so she wouldn’t overdose.

If she did overdose, she thought angrily, serves Sloane right.

As she was slipping away, she wondered what memory might come this time.

She noticed the tension in Sloane’s face as his hands flitted over the controls. “What’s wrong with your ship?” she asked.

“One of her old war wounds. The scanners are screwed to hell. We nearly flew through another ship back there because the computer didn’t detect it as soon as it should have.”

Raena sank into the copilot’s chair, her stomach queasy again. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to slow to normal space, so we can see what we’re going to hit while we still have time to avoid it?”

Scowling, Sloane punched the sequence into the navcomputer before Raena could strap herself down. So he was touchy about his flying. Fine. As long as he didn’t kill her trying to prove his skill.

An unfamiliar voice boomed over the ship’s comm system. “B719, stand by for boarding.”

Sloane swore and flipped switches for the rear viewscreen. The haze cleared to reveal an Imperial warship, too close to be in focus, floating behind them.

“Stellar.” He caught her arm and hauled her back toward the hold. Raena let him take her wherever he wanted to go. At this point, the external airlock would have been welcome.

Overhead, the Imperial warship latched onto them with a clank.

Sloane grabbed a sonic drill from the tool nook and played it over a wall in the hallway. The bolts shook loose to reveal a hidden cubbyhole. “Get in,” he ordered. “Don’t break any of those bags of Messiah. One breath of that, and you’ll be a hundred before you can count to five.”

Cautiously, Raena set a high-heeled boot among the plastic bags on the locker floor. She clamped her eyes shut as he replaced the metal panel.

The cloying smell of plastic filled the locker and choked her. She tried to breathe shallowly though the fabric of her cloak. Darkness washed over her as Sloane turned off the hallway lights. Shuddering, she put out a hand to make sure the panel did not close in on her.

Claustrophobia was the worst. She wished she were afraid of water or rodents or fire or thunderstorms, anything other than small places. Space travel was difficult enough for her, without being forced into the lockers or tunnels or prison cells or any number of other tiny places where she kept finding herself. At this moment, she wanted to start screaming and never stop, let the terror out, but she knew it wouldn’t help. The despair was even more painful than the fear.

The overhead noises intensified as the Imperials completed hauling in Sloane’s ship. Then someone banged on the main hatch with the butt of a gun.

“Cool your jets,” Sloane shouted as he pounded the combination into the lock.

When the hatch whooshed open, light trickled in around the panel in front of Raena. She stifled a sigh of relief. The walls remained steadfast in their original places.

“How can I help you, gentlemen?” Sloane offered.

“Surrender your passenger.”

Sloane laughed. “Does this look like a pleasure cruiser?”

“What’s your cargo, then?”

“I’m between shipments now, but I’ve got a bid in on some Yangmai holos. You know the kind.” He chuckled salaciously. “Ought to be an interesting haul, if I get it.”

Something metal trailed across the metal wall of the hallway. Raena twitched as the locker hummed around her. Then the pitch changed. The metal tapped on the wall to make a point.

“What’s in there?”

“Wiring,” Sloane answered.

She heard a gun powering up.

“Put it in a holding pattern,” Sloane protested. “I’d be glad to open it for you.”

He used his sonic drill to open the panel in question. All around Raena, the metal whined and set her teeth on edge. She held herself rigid. She wished she had the power to will herself to die, to vanish, to be completely erased from time and space.

“See?” Sloane asked. “Only wires.”

“Lucky for you.” The metal dragged over a few more panels, stopping in front of Raena.

She knew what was coming. She remembered it. Her muscles quivered with fear. Sloane removed the panel and she couldn’t run. She couldn’t escape. She couldn’t even shift her feet, for fear of piercing one of the pouches of Messiah. The soldiers stunned her point-blank and hauled her back to Thallian and his torture machine …

Rather than watch the memory play out, Raena stomped down hard on a pouch of Messiah. The heel of her boot pierced the pouch, scattering the powdery drug throughout inside of the tiny locker.

Raena gulped in as much as she could. The drug slammed into her system, blotting her out instantly. It felt as if she had been flung bodily against a wall. She forgot how to breathe.

Raena leaned over the handlebars of the jet bike, wringing out all the speed she could from it. Ahead of her, a boy on another bike dodged through the spires of the skyscrapers on Kai, heading toward the spaceport. He nearly impacted one spire, then overcorrected. Raena winced. She hoped he wouldn’t let his fear get the better of him. She needed him to pull it together enough to get himself safely back to his ship—so she could steal it.

Of course, he was Thallian’s son, so he was used to living with a certain level of terror. The boy got the bike back under control and buzzed off in a straight line. Raena eased off her own throttle, slowing a little so she wouldn’t catch him up yet.

He wove over the maze of docking slips, then recognized the one he was heading for. He sent his jet bike into a dive, braking as he descended. Raena hit the throttle again, closing the gap between them. She loosened her safety straps one-handed as she got closer, then unlimbered the stun stick she’d taken from a security guard when she stole the bike.

Holding the stick in her right hand, she sprang off the bike, spreading out in the air to slow her fall, then tucking into a ball around the stun stick to somersault until she could get her feet under her. She landed in a perfect three-point stance atop the Thallians’ ship. She checked herself, noted that she had the stun stick angled just so, and grinned. Sometimes, she just loved what her body could do.

Her bike plummeted into the roof of the docking bay next door, exploding into a fireball. Debris rained down around her.

She crept to the edge of the Thallian ship in time to see figures coming out of the shadow of the ship’s hatch. A man frogmarched the boy down the ship’s ramp, out where she could see them both. The man’s gun pointed steadily at the boy’s head.

Raena leapt down behind them, between the pair and the open door of the ship. “He’s mine!”

The man wrenched the boy around to face her. “No worries, Raena. I’m ready to get out of here, too.”

The man reminded her of Gavin, but he was older, his face wrinkled like a crumpled piece of paper. What was left of his hair had turned the color of cobwebs.

“Who are you?” Raena said. If he killed the boy, she might never find Thallian. She dropped the stun stick at her feet and stepped over it, leaving her hands raised above her waist.

“Gavin,” he said, as if that should be obvious.

“No. I left Gavin in the market with Ariel.”

“That’s another Gavin.” He grimaced. “A younger one. I’m running out of time, Raena. Let me come with you.”

“Where do you think I’m going?

“Off to Thallian’s homeworld. To finish what he started.”

What kind of trap was this? Who was this old man? How did he know where she was going? How had he found the Thallians’ transport, when she’d had no idea where it was until the kid led her to it?

Someone had betrayed her, but she didn’t have time to allow it to slow her down. She had to get off Kai quickly, before Planetary Security found her, or else she was going back to a jail cell to serve time for defending herself against Thallian’s minions.

She took another step, hands still raised. “Why should I believe you?”

“I thought you’d ask how I knew where to find you,” the stranger said by way of an answer. “After you left me on Kai, Planetary Security threw me an’ Ariel off-world. I snuck back on and was able to figure out which ship you stole. You were long gone by then and I couldn’t figure out how to track you. But now I’ve come back from the future for you. That’s why I knew which docking slip the boy would bring you to. I even know which planet you’re going to take him to.”

How could he know that, when she hadn’t told anyone? Whether he was Gavin or merely some kind of madman who thought he was, she didn’t trust him. She couldn’t. She had to contact Mykah and the crew. She had a message to deliver to Kavanaugh and Ariel. Time was steadily growing shorter before Planetary Security converged on her here.