Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (16 page)

Raena rolled off her bunk. She woke when she hit the deck. Hard. Winded, she lay still a moment, waiting for sensation to flood back into her limbs. Until the shock wore off, she wouldn’t know if she’d broken anything.

Pain ran warmly through her. She flexed her fingers, rolled her hands around on her wrists. Her left wrist protested, but it moved. No permanent damage done. That was lucky.

The dreams were getting worse, she thought. They were more and more detailed. Longer. And her subconscious was providing more unsavory details about Gavin than she ever wanted to know.

Thank the stars it hadn’t really happened that way in real life. Ariel’s dad bought her from the Viridians after the tournament. He himself never laid a hand on her. Instead, he ran her through a week’s worth of tests so he could be certain of her conditioning, then he gave her as a gift to Ariel. A birthday present.

Life as a slave had not been too bad, other than understanding that her purpose was to die for the spoiled rich girl, if it ever came to that. Luckily, Ariel was well liked—and rich—enough that it never did.

Raena pushed herself off the deck into sitting up. A glance at the clock made her wince. She hoped someone else was awake at this hour, so she would have an excuse to stay up for a while.

When she stumbled into the galley, Mykah was there, stirring a pot on the stove. Before she could apologize and escape, he asked, “Another nightmare?”

“It was brutal,” she admitted. “I fell out of bed to make it stop.”

He came over to take her left arm gently in his hands and tested her wrist. “Are you all right?”

His concern was painful for her to hear. She extracted her arm from his hands, flexing her fingers, and went to get a drink of water. As she poured it, she thought to ask, “What are you doing up?”

“Coni’s purring woke me.” He laughed fondly. “I was going to fix myself a nightcap and go back to bed.”

“What’s in it?”

“Warm rice milk, some spices, and a healthy dose of rum.”

She smiled at him through her exhaustion. “Would it be too much trouble to make two?”

“No trouble at all.” He pulled the galley first aid kit from the wall and set it on the table without comment.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Raena argued as she popped the kit’s lid open. “The shock of the fall was worse than the landing.”

“What were you dreaming about?”

She noticed he had his back toward her. Making conversation, she understood, not fussing over her. “I was dreaming about being a slave.”

She eased herself in behind the table. The kit had a tube of analgesic cream, she saw. Someone had used some of it, maybe Mykah after their sparring sessions. Raena twisted the cap open and squirted some onto her left wrist, gingerly rubbing it in.

“You were on a Viridian ship?” he prompted gently.

“Yeah. As a kid. The dream was about the tournament just before they sold me off. You’ve heard about their gladiator battles, where they pit a group of slaves against some monsters? They don’t care what the death toll is, because they sell tickets to the battles, then auction the winner off.”

“It’s mostly illegal now.” Mykah set two mugs and a bottle of rum on the table.

“It was probably illegal then,” she answered. “It didn’t stop it from happening.”

He returned to the table with a steaming pan that smelled so inviting that Raena felt a little better already.

“This works best if you pour the milk into the rum, so serve yourself however much you want first.”

She filled her mug halfway. Mykah topped it off with the steaming milk, poured from a height. He didn’t spill a drop. After she retrieved her mug, he doctored his own.

“So you were the only survivor of the tournament you fought in?” Mykah guessed.

She nodded. “At the time, I didn’t think anything about it. I was so furious at everything that had happened to me that I focused my anger on the things in the arena. Now I think: I was eleven. They put a naked child into a certain death battle, just to die for the sake of entertainment.”

Mykah slid in beside her at the table. He sipped his nightcap, which reminded Raena to pick hers up. The warmth felt good, seeping through the cup into her hands.

This was weird, she thought, to be alone in the middle of the night with their captain—and his girlfriend asleep down the hall. Rather than relaxing, her senses prickled even more awake. She needed Coni to help her get her new identity documents cemented in place. One stroke of Coni’s anger and it would all unravel. Raena would be revealed or worse.

She was about to make some excuse and escape when Mykah said, “Coni and I were talking about you earlier tonight.” He didn’t look up from his cup. “She thinks you might sleep better with company.”

Raena set her cup carefully on the table. Her anger rapidly switched directions—from Mykah putting her in a potentially dangerous situation, to the fact that her crewmates were making sleeping arrangements for her behind her back.

Before she could distill her fury into words, Mykah continued. “Coni doesn’t understand completely how problematic human interactions can get. Among her people, affection is disconnected from sex. They go into heat, to be crude about it, and mate without any emotional involvement. For them, it’s a purely physical hunger. Anyone can fill it. She’s read about humans and worked with them for several years, but she doesn’t fully grasp how layered our relationships can be.”

He sipped his nightcap and looked up at her. “I would be glad to keep you company, Raena, if you ever decide you want it. But I’m aware that your past is complicated and I don’t want to make your life any more difficult.”

Raena waited, but he seemed to be waiting for her response. She said quietly, “Is it okay that I’m freaked out by all of this?”

He clinked his mug against hers. “It’s okay if you’re freaked out on a whole spectrum of levels.”

“Good, because I am.” She had her first drink of the nightcap, which was more delicious than she’d expected. It felt like exactly what she needed.

She struggled to speak her thoughts. “I appreciate what you’re offering me. And I appreciate Coni’s generosity. But you know I’ve had spectacularly bad judgment when it comes to my commanding officers, so let’s keep everything professional for now.”

“I don’t really command you,” Mykah pointed out. “But I respect your decision.”

She though he looked a tiny bit relieved.

“Why don’t you head back to bed?” she suggested. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Yeah, it is.” He got up and put his cup and the pan in the dishwasher, but left the bottle of rum on the table for her. “Rest, if you can. We’ll need you tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 8

B
y the time she finally got back to bed, Raena wondered if she’d imagined the whole conversation with Mykah. Had he really told her that his girlfriend suggested they sleep together?

She burrowed into the pillow, deciding she would act from now on as if she had hallucinated the offer.

That was more comforting than to consider the repercussions if she acted on it.

Unfortunately, the nightcap didn’t keep the nightmares at bay.

Raena hadn’t really worked out a plan in advance. As soon as Thallian was up and out for the day, she forced herself out of bed. The burns striping her back screamed as she dressed. In case the wounds came open and began to weep, she put on three layers of clothing.

Then she pulled a bag of equipment—scramblers, credit chips, traveling cash in a variety of currencies—from the cupboard where she’d hidden it in case of emergency. This was the emergency for which she’d been preparing.

She had the advantage that no one aboard the
Arbiter
really knew what she did, beyond keeping Thallian from molesting the rest of the crew. One would think they would be grateful for that, but not really, no. Still, the fluidity of her job description worked to her advantage. Since what she was assigned to do was so nebulous, generally no one questioned whatever she did.

She took over a terminal in the detention monitoring office and attached a scrambler to it. It didn’t matter too much if she covered her tracks, since she expected Thallian to discover her mutiny in fairly quick order, but no need to make it insultingly obvious either.

She looked over the new prisoner roster. Another human had been brought in overnight. Raena keyed in a command for him to be transferred to Ariel Shaad’s cell. She ordered a pair of robots to meet her there.

As soon as the boy had been delivered, Raena let herself into the cell. She let the door close before she broke the kid’s neck. Ariel shouldn’t have had time to get attached to him yet.

As one of the robots incinerated his body, Raena grabbed Ariel’s arm and pulled her close. “I’m arranging your escape,” Raena said through gritted teeth into Ariel’s ear, so she couldn’t be heard over the incineration. “The cameras won’t be off too much longer. I’ve scrambled the time signatures, so it will look like you’ve been ashed and he was moved in to take your place.”

Raena took the box of ashes from the robot and labeled it with Ariel’s name and prisoner ID number. Then she turned back to the blond girl. “Up on the stretcher,” she ordered.

For a change, Ariel didn’t argue. She hopped on the stretcher pushed by the second robot and sprawled face down as if unconscious. Raena had worried they would lose valuable time debating, but apparently Ariel was so eager to get off the
Arbiter
that she’d decided to be compliant.

Raena checked the scramblers on the robots, then pulled the sheet up over Ariel and opened the cell door. The robots glided forward to keep pace as she returned down the corridor.

“Lord Thallian wants this one down in his lab,” she told the duty officer. “You’ll find the order.”

He checked his datascreen. “Wasting no time on that one,” he noted.

“I don’t question,” Raena answered.

The man didn’t hide his grimace. “Go ahead.”

Raena diverted to the hangar and loaded Ariel as cargo on a hopper. Then she went off to arrange the clearance for her to take off.

When she returned to the hopper, Ariel had gotten herself up, uniformed, and armed. Raena didn’t ask how that had happened. Instead, she handed over a chip. “These are everything you’ll need to get out of here.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I’m going to cover for you.”

She should have seen the scanner case coming. Maybe she did and chose not to duck. She didn’t remember later, after it ceased to matter.

When Raena came to, it wasn’t on the single-person hopper. The engines had a much deeper throb.

“Lie still,” Ariel said affectionately. “I don’t know if you have a concussion.”

Raena realized she was sprawled on a stainless steel bench. “Who’s flying?” she demanded.

“A Coalition friend. He saw us in the hangar and helped me get you aboard a shuttle.”

“Can you trust him?”

“He had the right Coalition safe words.”

Raena stared at her.

Ariel burst into shaky tears. “I was so scared,” she confessed. “I just wanted to get out of there. I wasn’t sure I could do it alone.”

Raena got up painfully, took Ariel in her arms, and did not hiss when the blond girl clung to her. The sting from the burns on her back was more shocking now, when she didn’t have endorphins in her blood to mitigate the pain.

Once Ariel calmed down enough to be coherent, Raena said, “You had a sidearm.”

It was still holstered on Ariel’s thigh. Raena accepted it, checked its charge. Then she strode into the cockpit and shot the mystery Coalition man dead before he could protest.

Ariel heard the shot and sprinted into the cockpit. She found Raena in the pilot’s chair, staring at the readout from the navcom.

“What did you do?” Ariel demanded.

“I wanted to find out where he was taking us,” Raena answered calmly.

Ariel wanted to shake her. “You could’ve just asked.”

“He could’ve just lied.”

Ariel slumped into the copilot’s seat, then realized it was as covered in blood and tissue as everything else in the cockpit. “You didn’t have to kill him,” Ariel said miserably. She felt sick. “You don’t have to kill everybody.”

“You’re not fourteen any more,” Raena said harshly. “You should know better than to get in the first spaceship that comes along.”

“But he—”

Raena cut her off. “He had the codes you knew. On a ship where Coalition prisoners are tortured.” She wiped the hair back from her face angrily, leaving a bloody smear across her cheek. “A stranger on the
Arbiter
lured you onto a ship impounded by the
Arbiter.
You tell me the odds that it’s being tracked.”