Origin (22 page)

I nodded. “The woman who had me before Lashin liked to put me in small boxes. Sometimes I didn’t fit until I was forced.” I pulled up my sleeve and pointed to my elbow and its obvious badly healed break. “You guys never asked why my arm looks like this.”

“Gods,” Clay whispered before pulling me into his arms. “I knew something bad had happened to your arm, but I honestly didn’t need to know. It doesn’t make you any less beautiful. But now I want you to tell us her name so Anders and I can hunt her down after all this.”

I pulled back, shaking my head. “No, I don’t need you to. Really. You see, you’ve taught me something pretty damned important. I have choices now. I never got into one of those boxes by choice, but I can do it with one of these. I want to see Kithra. Want Crichton there so we can force him to get well and tell us the whole truth of what happened. I want to know what that explosive is and who was working with Saturna. All these things have become important to me.”

Anders had gone still and when I looked at him, he turned away from me. My heart clenched.

“I can do this. It’s my choice. I need, desperately need to understand where I came from, to try and figure out who my family was.”

Clay framed my face with his hands. I stared into those crystal-blue eyes, watching him read my expression, indecision still on his. “Everyone needs to understand their origin,” he said, voice low.

“Such a brave girl,” Anders said as he came up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my waist and hugged me against him, tugging Clay into the hug with a fist in his shirt.

I reached up to touch Anders’s face and mis-quoted, “‘Don’t feel sorry for her. She was one of those who likes to grow up.’”

Anders started to laugh and Clay groaned, burying his face in my neck. “Not another Peter Pan fan.”

“Let’s do this thing,” Anders said. “Get it over with so we can get back to the important stuff.”

“And what’s that?” Clay stretched up to kiss Anders over my shoulder.

“Fucking, of course.”

Chapter Fifteen

“I believe it’s time for a bigger box.”

“Nonsense. She likes this one. She told me so.”

“Did she say that recently?”

“A year or so ago.” My owner knocked on the box. “Little Siri, would you like to come out today?”

Their words sort of spun around in my brain, not making sense. Swirls of sound that I couldn’t catch and didn’t want to. I’d finally reached a point of inner sedation, as I liked to call it. A place where nothing could touch me and my pain was merely a hungry wraith lurking in the background. If I let their words come together, that apparition would eat me alive.

“Let me see her. I’ve heard she is Gwinarian.”

“Partially. There’s some other kind of blood in her because she has the ugliest spots all over her face and shoulders.” Her laughter sounded twisted and cruel as it always did. “She is not your type. She has tits.”

“She’s Gwinarian. That’s my type.”

“What is your morbid fascination with the species?”

“Let me buy her.”

“Sight unseen?”

“You forget. I know you, Luana. You only take the best and if you’ve had this one six years, she’s the best.”

“I saw her as a child and knew she would blossom into something extraordinary.”

“And were you wrong?”

Her tone turned throaty, low. “I’m never wrong. So, how much would you offer without ever seeing the creature?”

“You think the term will scare me off? I can offer you kithronite. As much as you can carry.”

“For that, I’ll sell you this entire ship. It’s off the grid—the perfect hiding place for you, Mr. Lashin.”

Noise, real noise, pulled me from the nightmare, or in this case, the memory. Boots sounded close to the crate and I held my hand over my mouth, trying hard not to let the cries loose. I thought I could handle being smuggled into Kithra’s supply station, but the dreams were coming with every close of my eyes. I should have let them gas me.

There were voices, lots of voices around us at different times and the smell of vegetables above me sometimes made me gag. I had a breathing tube, a water tube and even one that held a protein and vitamin paste I was overly familiar with. If I’d known I’d be eating what I grew up surviving on, I probably wouldn’t have made the choice to lie down in this small space. If I’d known about the waste tube…

At one point, the voices stopped and from the echoes I heard after being jostled about, I guessed we were finally in someone’s cargo hold. I wanted to call out to see if Anders and Clay were nearby, but I couldn’t risk it. All it would take was one enforcer standing silently in the room and we’d be caught. I’d heard them inspecting the boxes, had felt the one I was in shake as the top was opened. I did spend the time I wasn’t hallucinating with flashbacks wondering why Anders and Clay had come. They’d done what they promised. Delivered me and Crichton. There was really no need for them to go all the way to Kithra. They could have left me on that moon and taken off in their pirate ship to do whatever it was they planned now that they wouldn’t be wreaking havoc on Saturna mining sites and ships. Neither had talked about what was next for them.

I wanted to be a part of whatever that was so badly. Right before I’d crawled into this box, they’d taken turns kissing me until my toes curled. They kissed like men who didn’t plan to let me go.

They just never said it.

The last few hours of the trip turned out to be the hardest. At one point, I didn’t think I could hold in the screams that built up in my chest and clawed up my throat. It was too quiet outside my crate so I was afraid to even move. It was Anders’s Peter Pan stories that kept me going. The things the boy had said about dreams coming true and sacrificing everything for them.

My dream had always been to go home and that was coming true. I had a new dream now—to keep Anders and Clay—and during those long, quiet hours in the dark, I held on to both dreams.

When my crate was opened, I think Anders and Clay both expected to find me in a worse state than I actually was. The anxiety on Anders’s beautiful face cleared up instantly when I gave him that smile he loved.

“Thank the gods,” Clay breathed as Anders hauled me out of the crate and into his arms, tugging Clay in with us as always.

I wrinkled my nose when it was squished between their chests. “We need a shower.”

“I agree,” Jarana said as she came up to us. “I’m so sorry about all this, but it worked. We’re on my ship and I’ll be taking over from the copilot in training before we get to the debris fields.” Her casual clothes of loose lounge pants and thick shirt threw me off at first. She’d been wearing some sort of leather outfit on the vidscreen before. “It’s good to see another one of us returned home. You’re going to cause quite a stir. I saw the footage of what you did. Was seriously hot.” She winked. “You’ll be free to do as you please while on Kithra until the new enforcers get there. Nobody there would dream of turning you in—not for what you did.”

Two men walked up behind her. The Replicant I’d seen with her on the vidscreen and a blond human who carried a baby girl. She had his silky hair and Jarana’s amber eyes.

“It’s Freckles.” The Replicant smiled at me and I wondered why he’d put a tattoo on his face. It looked kind of like a swirl of flames with a dagger underneath his eye. It didn’t detract from his appearance, but it seemed a strange place for one. “We have a decent-sized shower in our cabin. You three are welcome to use it. As Jarana said, you should be safe on Kithra until Lux goes out to pick up the next group of Gwinarians. There’s supposed to be an enforcer coming with them.”

Jarana scowled. “I’m working on that. But Lux can put it off, lie about engine trouble or whatever.” She held out her arms to the baby who made a sweet, happy noise and lunged toward her.

I decided the scary Gwinarian wasn’t so scary after all as she kissed and snuggled her daughter close.

“We put your bags in by the shower, so you’ll have your clothes. There are a lot of people coming to greet you when we arrive. I’m not the only one who enjoyed that footage.” Jarana laughed when her daughter poked her in the nose. Must have been hard because she blinked as her eyes watered. She turned away. “Let’s get this going. I’m ready to be home. Can’t wait to see how Lux is dealing with her pregnancy.”

“Lux pregnant scares me,” the Replicant was saying as he followed her. He gave me a smile over his shoulder and several earrings along the top of his ear sparkled. “Bye, Freckles.”

“Maska, you survived
me
pregnant. How worse could Lux be?”

“True,” he answered as they reached the doorway.

Clay glared at the Replicant’s back. “I really don’t like the way he was looking at Siri.”

“I don’t like the nickname. Who said he could give you a nickname?” Anders stepped up beside Clay, his eyes shooting daggers at where the Replicant had been.

Jealousy was good, I decided. It meant I was one step closer to getting what I wanted. Waking up every damned day with them in my bed.

Flying through the debris fields turned out to be scarier than the damned crate. Jarana flew silently, all her focus zeroed in on getting us around the huge chucks of rock and floating debris. Seeing the remains of the devastation to my planet kept me quiet too. I finally had to close my eyes, but I forced myself to open them once we stopped swerving. I kept them opened wide as we drew closer to land.

Massive trees unlike any others on known planets showed first, their variegated leaves forming a cushion of blues in all shades. I caught sight of a waterfall behind what I assumed was the new main tube and pod system.

There weren’t many—it was nothing like the cities I remembered from before, but it looked so much better than I expected.

When Jarana brought the ship to a halt on the loading dock, she finally spoke. “Yeah, she’s obviously pregnant.”

I unstrapped myself from the seat and stood to look out. The woman from the vidscreens, Lux, was bent over a waste receptacle, and from the way her body jerked, heaving really hard. I winced, watched as a big dark-haired man rubbed her back.

Then I noticed all the Gwinarians who had gathered in the large area behind Lux and the man. Maybe fifty or so.

My heart stuttered, then picked up to race like crazy.

I was home.

The damned shaking started and I didn’t even hesitate to do the one thing I needed right then. I moved around the seat I’d been in and crawled into Anders’s lap. Clay reached over to clasp my hand, stroked his thumb over my knuckles.

Nobody said anything and the quiet didn’t bother me. I was too overcome by the wild tangle of emotions rushing through me, tripping over each other, racing to be the first to cause tears. A part of me hated this weakness, but the bigger part offered a pass this time. Fourteen years of wishing to return home, to find out where I came from—who I came from—and to be facing it now.

I was so thankful to be doing this with Clay and Anders there to support me. So thankful to know I could lean on them—that they wanted me to.

Jarana passed us and I caught a small smile she aimed at me before she stepped off the bridge. I wondered what her return to Kithra had been like. Something told me hers was probably as traumatic. Something also told me she probably handled it on her own without crawling into a big man’s lap.

I tightened my arms around Anders’s neck, glad he was there.

“You ready to put your feet on Kithra, sweetheart?” Anders hugged me.

“As soon as I’m through soaking up some of your strength,” I muttered into his hair. We’d all used the same shampoo—a sort of spicy scent I couldn’t describe—and it smelled fantastic on him.

His chuckled rumbled against my chest. “Take what you need.” He kissed my temple.

“I can’t believe how much work they’ve done here.” Clay stood and walked to the window. “This is the first time we’ve been back since before the explosions. I’d expected it to look worse.”

“The Company is motivated.” Anders shifted on the seat. “Kithronite prices are beyond high. So much money to be made.”

I finally lifted my head and smiled at him.

“Got enough?” he asked.

I nodded and climbed off his lap. “Let’s go. Most of these people are probably waiting to see Crichton.”

“Or you.” Clay turned and walked behind me as we left the deck. “It’s my understanding that most Gwinarians come to greet each new one returning home. Warrant or not, these people consider you family.”

I halted and blinked back sudden hot tears. “That’s lovely.”

Jarana’s husbands had already loaded the crate holding Crichton onto a hover dolly, but they waited until I walked ahead of them with Clay and Anders. I was holding both their hands as I put my foot back onto my home for the first time in fourteen years.

The crowd erupted into a cheer and when someone grabbed me and hugged me, old panic rushed to my chest and I froze, turning a frantic gaze to Clay. He frowned and peeled the young Gwinarian woman off me and stepped in front of me before another one could step in.