Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (35 page)

“You didn’t answer mine, either. But I don’t love you, Gavin. I can’t. I stopped believing I might the night you had the argument with Ariel about what made my being her slave any different than my being Thallian’s aide. I can’t forgive you for hurting her like that. I’m not sure I ever loved you, the real Gavin Sloane. I never really knew you, until you got me out of that tomb. All the affection I felt for you in those years of darkness, the whole relationship I lived in my imagination before you freed me from that tomb: that makes it hard to wake up with the image of your blood on my hands, time and time again.”

“It was hard for me, too,” he protested.

“Did you ever stop to think about what the Messiah drug did to the addicts’ targets, back during the War? Did you care what you were doing to me, in the galaxy here and now?”

He smiled at her. “You’re strong,” he said. “You’re young. You always survive.”

The hair stood up on the back of Raena’s neck. In other words, he didn’t care what he did to her.

Kavanaugh stepped in before she hit him. “Where did you get the Messiah drug, Gavin?”

“It was in the stuff your team hauled out of the Templar tombs. There were three crates of it, like the Templar had been warehousing it. I can’t understand why they stored it there—there were Templar storehouses across the galaxy much more centrally located—but they must have thought nothing was as secure as their tombs. Since they allowed no one on their tombworld as long as there were Templar alive to guard it, no one could discover they were the ones destabilizing the border governments. Humanity made the perfect scapegoat, which must have amused the bugs endlessly.”

“Where’s all the Messiah now?” Raena asked.

“I sold it back to the pusher.” He coughed, a horrible wet sound that wracked him until he was bent double.

Raena rubbed his back, trying to calm him. When he had settled back at last, she asked, “You sold it to Outrider?”

He nodded. “He’d gone all legit, lying low, working as a pharmacist, so you can imagine how surprised he was to see one of the old runners getting back in touch. Took a while for him to believe what I had.”

Raena’s heart plummeted inside her. She couldn’t begin to envision the damage that crates of Messiah could do, wild in the galaxy. The worst scenarios she could envision were probably nothing as bad as what was to come. Her first inclination hadn’t changed after all these years; there was danger ahead and she should run. But where could humanity run to? If the whole galaxy banded together and blamed humanity for the havoc this drug could do, there would be no defense. No safe hiding place. Humans were scattered across the galaxy now. They had no central government, no army, no place to hide. They were too vulnerable. They would be hunted down, rounded up, and exterminated.

Gavin fumbled at the black rubber bracelet hooked around his left wrist. With difficulty he managed to tug the prongs out of the socket and pull the thing off. He held it out to Raena.

“What’s this?”

“Tracking program. I bugged the crates before I let them out of my sight. All of the packets have tracers, too, in case Outrider decided he didn’t like my packing job and re-crated everything.”

She took the bracelet and handed it to Kavanaugh. “Thanks, Gavin. We’ll check it out.”

“There’s more.” He pointed a trembling finger at a twist of metal on the shelf near the dining table. “Camera. I got footage of Outrider. So he can be identified. And my computer has the contact codes for him.”

Later, maybe, she’d be stunned by the layers of Sloane’s betrayal of the pusher, but now she was simply grateful for it. They still had a long way to go to capture this guy.

“What did he pay you?” she asked.

“He showed me how to build the vaporizer. He told me how to use the drug. And then he made a huge anonymous donation to the Shaad Family Foundation.”

That was the name of Ariel’s charity, the one that bought human kids out of slavery and found them homes. Raena was horrified by the sick irony of Outrider, future assassin of the human race, helping Ariel save its children for the coming slaughter.

“Why?”

“Because Ariel deserved something out of this. This damned drug taught me what it was like to love someone who couldn’t love me back. I finally felt sorry for her.”

“Did you hear all that?” Raena asked the comm bracelet on her left wrist. “We need to go after Outrider
now
, before this stuff hits the galaxy.”

“Yes,” Coni said. “Mykah’s on his way over to get the tracker.”

Kavanaugh said, “I’ve hired a med transport to get Gavin onto the
Veracity
.”

“Are we taking him with us?” Raena asked.

“We can’t leave him here to die alone.”

Raena met Kavanaugh’s eyes.

“All right, I can’t leave him here,” Kavanaugh corrected. “I will nurse him on the
Veracity
.”

“If you could get him to the Templar tombs,” she suggested, “you could keep him alive—”

Gavin fastened a bony hand on her arm. “You’re not shutting me in there. I don’t want to stay alive. I got nothing to live for in this universe. I fucked everything up so badly …”

“Look, Gavin, I don’t pity you. You made your choices. I didn’t bewitch you. I didn’t ask for you to obsess over me. I owed you for getting me out of that tomb, but we tried living together and it didn’t work.”

As she talked, Kavanaugh moved around the apartment, gathering clothes and medicines—liquid for his cough, lotion for his thin skin, painkillers for his twisted joints. Raena put what food Gavin had into a cooler. There wasn’t much. Apparently, Gavin had barely attended to the minimal needs of his body while he lay on the sofa, chasing dreams.

“Why don’t you love me?” he asked quietly.

Raena turned to regard him, the sad, shriveled old thing.

“Gavin,” she said thoughtfully, “you don’t even like yourself. For a long time, I didn’t like myself either, but being locked up alone for so long changed that. Maybe we could have had a chance, being broken together, but I want more from life than that. I’m willing to be alone until I can find someone who respects who I am and what I’ve been through—and doesn’t want to take that away from me or change me to make himself more comfortable.”

“I’ve given up everything for you,” Gavin argued. “I spent a fortune and wasted years to rescue you from that tomb. Now I’ve wrecked my health and used up the rest of my life …”

“Did I ask you for any of that?” she said quietly. “You chose to make those sacrifices—and I respect the power of the emotions behind those choices. But they don’t obligate me to anything.”

How, she wondered, could he know so much about her life, all the details, all the turning points, and not understand her at all?

“If I was looking for someone to give me every material thing I could possibly want in the galaxy,” Raena said, “I would still be with Ariel. If I wanted to feel lives in my hands, I could have stayed in the Imperial Diplomatic Corps. All I want now is freedom, Gavin. I want to belong to me. We might have been friends some day, if you’d just given me some space.”

“Being friends was not enough.”

“Did you ever think that it was so hard to change things because they weren’t supposed to be changed?”

“See, that kind of negative thinking is why I adore you,” Gavin purred.

After Kavanaugh got Sloane delivered to the
Veracity
, Coni had seen him settled comfortably in Raena’s cabin. She was already prepared with her surveillance system to interview Sloane as extensively as she could, teasing out all the details of the drug and its dealer.

Raena shifted into the cabin Vezali knocked together for her in the hold. It was configured more or less like the cell the Thallians had meant for her when she first came aboard the ship. The room wasn’t elegant or very comfortable, but it would do.

The
Veracity
’s crew differed on whether they would release the interviews with Gavin to the media or if they’d take the recording straight to the Council of Worlds and screen it for the government first.

The crew seemed to understand that chasing Outrider was more dangerous than anything Raena had gotten them into yet. They could easily be accused as pawns in the dissemination of the Messiah drug, or worse, as terrorists working toward the overthrow of the galactic status quo. Since Mellix was with them, public opinion could swing either way. There were still powerful forces out there, looking to do Mellix in.

Even Mykah was torn. He had the sense to be afraid to confront a pusher who knowingly dispensed a drug that would kill not only its users but hundreds, thousands, millions more who had nothing to do with it or him. If Mykah had had any kind of official government contacts, anyone with a paramilitary troop who could have captured Outrider in his place, then he would have gladly stepped aside.

In the end, Mellix persuaded the crew that they had a duty to the truth. Raena made it Mykah’s job to ensure the journalist survived the confrontation.

Kavanaugh contacted Outrider, posing as an old war buddy of Sloane’s—which was true, if the pusher cared to check. He delivered the Humans First! rant Raena wrote for him. Outrider agreed to come to Verwoest to discuss how he could aid Kavanaugh’s work.

Nursing Sloane fell to Kavanaugh. He was the only one who had any idea what to do and, anyway, Raena refused to spend much time with the old man. She didn’t see why Sloane should get what he wanted. She was not going to forgive him.

So Kavanaugh and Sloane talked over the past. Kavanaugh finally told the older man how much he had looked up to him, how grateful he was for all the times Sloane bailed him out of trouble, all the adventures they’d had when they were young.

Sloane mostly listened. He drifted in and out, sleeping a lot of the time.

When Mykah rang the dinner chime, Kavanaugh came out to find Raena already in the passage.

Doc would tell her
, Kavanaugh decided. Doc believed in regretting the things you did, not the things you didn’t. “You should go and sit with him,” he told Raena.

Her face was unreadable. “I’ve said everything I have to say to him.”

“He has things he needs to say to you.”

She considered that. “I don’t promise to like them,” she said finally.

“Fair enough.”

Raena let herself into her former cabin as Kavanaugh went on to dinner.

Raena pulled her desk chair over to the bed and let its magnetic feet seal to the deck. The sound woke Sloane.

“Really here?” he asked.

“Yeah. Kavanaugh said you had something to tell me.”

He chuckled. It was a weird, dry, alien sound. “Not gonna apologize to you,” he said. “Didn’t apologize to Ariel, and I shot her.”

“I’m not going to apologize to you either, Gavin.”

“I expect no less.”

He closed his eyes and seemed to drift off to sleep again. Raena watched his face and tried to see the man who’d kissed her on Nizarrh, back when she was young enough to believe there might be such a thing as love at first sight. In her tomb, she’d convinced herself that he’d come onto the
Arbiter
to release her from Thallian’s torture machine because he had loved her, not because losing her to Thallian had hurt his pride, or because the Coalition had offered him a bounty for her.

How to explain his desecration of the Templar tombs for her? Gavin had paid so many bribes, bought so much equipment and dragged it out to that rock, hired the men—but why? He hadn’t expected to find her alive. Why would he do all that for her corpse?

He couldn’t have really loved her, Raena told herself. Before she came out of her tomb, he hadn’t ever spent an entire day with her. He picked her up on Nizarrh and lost her to Thallian’s men, then freed her briefly on the
Arbiter
before she was captured again. Then he’d spent all the years of her imprisonment learning as much about her life as he could …

She couldn’t understand it. All her life, Raena thought she’d loved people—her mother, Thallian, Sloane—only to find that she’d been wrong. She’d mimicked love, sensed how they wanted her to feel, but in the end, love was just ashes in her hands.

She didn’t mean to start crying, but when the tears filled her eyes, she didn’t move to wipe them away.

Sloane opened his eyes again. Without a word, he held his withered and trembling hand out to her.

Raena wove her fingers around his.

As if that was what he had been waiting for, Gavin’s breathing began to lengthen out. The exhalations grew longer. The intervals between breaths grew longer still.

Raena thought about calling for Kavanaugh, but there wasn’t anything more he could do. Sloane seemed at peace at last.

Raena thought she understood Ariel a little better now. Sloane could pull the grandest gestures, then follow them with petty cruelties. He could make you feel like the center of the universe, then say the most heartless things. Kavanaugh and Ariel both loved him, so he hurt them time and time again. And they forgave him time and time again. Maybe that was why he couldn’t love them back.

When Kavanaugh came back to check on them, Raena said, “He’s gone.”

“I thought it was getting close. You okay?”

She offered him a smile. “I’m sorry I hit you on Kai. I didn’t want Ariel to have to face Thallian again. I didn’t want anyone to be able to follow me. I thought I was going to my death, but that it would be worth it, if I could take Thallian down. I was angry and scared, so I lashed out at you. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. I’m sorry.”

Kavanaugh gazed at her. So many thoughts left shadows on his face, but all he said was, “Thank you.”

Raena nodded. “Leave me alone with him a little longer.”

After Kavanaugh left her, she sat with Sloane’s body, thinking over the good times. It didn’t matter what Sloane had done or why, only how it made her feel. There had been that kiss on Nizarrh, when every fiber of her body lit up. There had been the crazy escape from her cell on the
Arbiter
, when she would have done anything to thank Sloane for getting her out of Thallian’s torture machine. There had been the night on Brunzell, when Raena made love to Sloane for the first time, searching desperately for a reason to live.