Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (17 page)

The anger drained out of Ariel so fast that she had to lean her head on her knees. “I can’t go back there.”

“I will kill us first,” Raena promised.

“What are we going to do?”

“Ditch this ship. Try to get out past Coalition space. I don’t know. I wasn’t planning to come along with you.”

“I know,” Ariel said. “I couldn’t leave you.”

“Now there’s no one to cover your escape.” Raena was sitting awkwardly in the pilot’s chair, perched on its edge. Ariel had thought it was because she was avoiding the pilot’s blood, but his chair was less gory than everything else in the cockpit because his body had shielded it.

Blood striped Raena’s back diagonally from left shoulder to right hip.

Ariel gasped. “What happened to your back?”

“Thallian set me on fire for luring him away from you last night. He knew I was protecting you. He wanted to punish me for not being clear in my loyalties.”

“He would have killed you if you’d stayed behind.”

“He’s still going to kill me,” Raena corrected. “I just don’t know when any more.”

Ariel got up, unable to sit in this blood-covered room any longer. “I’ve got to get out of this uniform.”

“Not yet,” Raena said. “I’ve figured out where we are. Can you get us to Clio? We’ll have to find another ride from there.”

“Shift,” Ariel said. Raena got up stiffly so Ariel could take the controls. “Go see if there’s a shower and wash your wounds. I’ll come see what I can do to patch you up as soon as we’re underway.”

Raena was about to ghost away when Ariel called her back. She stretched one hand out for Raena’s. “Thank you,” she said, like she’d never meant anything in her life.

“Of course, Ari.” Raena smiled, but in her black eyes, Ariel saw depths of fear like she’d never known.

“We’ll get away from him,” she promised.

“No one ever gets away,” Raena answered.

Then she kissed Ariel and went to look for a shower.

After she was gone, curiosity got the better of Ariel. She rolled the dead man over with her boot.

He was too old to be an Imperial soldier, maybe seventy. His gray eyebrows and beard bristled, thick and full, but his hair had retreated until it left his crown bare. The hole from Raena’s death shot went in above his left ear. He’d turned his head when he heard her coming.

Ariel opened her eyes, catapulted out of the dream by the realization that the dead man was Gavin. She didn’t know how she’d recognized him—the shape of his nose, maybe—but she was certain she was correct.

What was the matter with her subconscious that it was rewriting history like that? She’d bopped Raena on the head with a scanner case, yeah, but she’d taken the hopper Raena had meant her to. They had gone to Clio. In fact, much of the conversation in the dream echoed what she remembered of the terrified race to get beyond Thallian’s reach. Except, she knew, there had been no “Coalition man” for Raena to assassinate.

Ariel’s hands shook as she reached out for a spice stick on the bedside table. She hoped it would settle her nerves.

As she opened her eyes in her cabin, Raena wondered,
What was it with killing Gavin?
It wasn’t as if she had anything against him. Yeah, he’d loved her in an obsessive, possessive way, but she didn’t really begrudge him that. In reality, he had been generous with her on Kai, relatively patient, and indulged her when he could figure out how. When the opportunity came for her to go off and kill Thallian, Gavin hadn’t actually stood in her way, like she had feared he might.

Yes, it was true she hadn’t officially broken up with Gavin, beyond running off after her destiny and not coming back. She wondered if Gavin had honestly expected her to come back after she assassinated Thallian. Other than the relatively cushy life Gavin could offer her, living on his profits from the looted Templar tombs, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to have come back to.

If she had been a different person, perhaps she could have loved Gavin with a passion equal to his own. She tried to imagine a life in which he let her come and go as she pleased, a life that felt like freedom. A life where he thought of her as an equal, not a pet or his girlfriend, not a child or a damsel he had rescued. He had rescued her, sure, she wasn’t debating that, by funding the operation that opened the Templar tombs—and she
would
be forever grateful for that—but she could not continue to be that same person, to live that same role over and over: the girl who needed rescue.

For one thing, no matter what she looked like, she was not a girl. Due to the weird Templar stone in which she’d been imprisoned, her body hadn’t aged a day. Outwardly, she still looked like the twenty-year-old who had been sealed up inside the Templar Master’s tomb. But the imprisonment had given her time to mature, whether or not her body changed.

So the way these dreams kept ending—with Gavin showing up unexpectedly and her killing him with whatever came to hand—made her really uncomfortable. She had no real grudge against Gavin. She would be glad to have a drink with him someday, if they accidentally found themselves in the same bar and she knew she could walk away alone afterward.

It was the sort of dilemma that she supposed someone else would discuss with her girlfriend. But Coni could barely be counted a friend and Vezali, while friendly, would require such a vast amount of backstory that merely listening to the history would be too much to ask.

There was only one person who knew Gavin well enough, good and bad, to be a sympathetic listener. When this adventure with Mellix was over, Raena would have to bother Ariel with her problems.

“We’ll be docking soon,” Haoun said over the comm.

“Thanks,” Raena answered. Time to suit up.

She pulled on another pair of Jain’s trousers and swam into another of his sweaters. This one was a steely gray that she quite liked.

Then she retrieved the paste she’d made in Mykah’s kitchen in the middle of the night. She’d worn something similar on Kai, but she hadn’t made anything like this from scratch in decades. Unsurprising, the recipe came back to her easily. Her hands had concocted it many times while drunk in the middle of the night.

She shook the jar good and hard, before unscrewing its lid. Holding her hair off her forehead with one hand, she quickly painted her face, blotting out the scar that missed removing her eye.

She reached out to close the clothes locker when her eye fell on the coat she’d stolen from Revan Thallian, previous captain of the
Veracity
.

Raena pulled the coat on and buttoned its cuffs back. It must have been long on Revan, but it hung to Raena’s ankles, with a cinched waist and a full skirt. Although it was big for her, it had enough interior structure to make her seem larger. Perfect. It wouldn’t replace her long-lost cloak, but it was a decent substitute. She felt dressed for battle now.

The coat had a surprising array of interior pockets, meant to be filled with weaponry. She checked through all the pockets, making sure that Revan hadn’t left any nasty surprises behind. Everything was empty and functional as his cabin had been when she commandeered it, except for the breast pocket. In it, Raena found a hard-copy photo of Eilif, Madame Thallian.

Raena strapped herself into the crash webbing, then picked up the photograph. In the picture, Eilif still looked like a young woman, slim and ramrod straight. The photographer caught her by surprise with a teacup in her hand, lifted halfway to her lips. Her smile looked genuine.

Interesting. Why did Revan have a photo of his younger brother’s wife?

Raena shook her head. Anything between Revan and Eilif was undoubtedly one of the great unconsummated romances of the galaxy. Jonan would have killed them both—Eilif first—if he’d ever found out they’d cheated on him.

Would Eilif want the photo, Raena wondered, or would she prefer not to be reminded of the years she’d belonged to the Thallians? Personally, Raena was glad not to have any mementos of her own service with Jonan, beyond the ones he’d carved into her flesh.

She set the photo aside, intending to ask Ariel about it whenever they spoke next. Now it was time to get her head in the game.

Raena didn’t really know what to expect in Capital City. She’d asked Mykah about its banal name, but he said that was merely the Galactic Standard translation. In every case, he said, Standard dumbed names down to their simplest components.

Mykah said the news reports from Capital City had been cautious, not wanting to panic the rest of the galaxy. He expected that people were exceptionally tense. The city occupied a moon-sized space station hung between three gates. All the older ships with non-tesseract drives had evacuated as many tourists and consular staff as possible after the tesseract announcement, but everyone left behind either had crucial governmental work to do or nowhere else to go. Everything from washing water to atmospheric filters was being strictly rationed. Very few people had enough of anything to be satisfied.

The
Veracity
planned to be in orbit long enough to transfer the vegetables out of the hold, find some sleep aids for Raena, and to get Mellix safely aboard. No telling how long that would take.

Raena hadn’t told Mykah that she and Coni had made another appointment for while they were visiting the station. She touched her eyebrow, tracing the contours of her scar, but didn’t allow herself to dwell on how she’d acquired it. The last thing she wanted was to drift off into the past again.

Haoun got the
Veracity
docked with Capital City’s elevator without a bump.

“Nice docking,” Raena told him over the comm.

“Thanks,” the big lizard answered. “Lots of simulator hours went into it.”

Raena laughed as she unclipped her harness and retrieved her high-heeled boots from the gun locker by the door. She buckled her boots on and decided to add one final element of Revan’s clothing. Inside one of the desk drawers, she’d found a long black box. Inside that lay a half-dozen pairs of matching black gloves. They were made of Viridian slave cloth, the weave so fine that individual threads were invisible. These gloves left no fibers or fingerprints behind to be traceable. She’d worn them constantly while on the run from Jonan.

Raena chose a pair from the box and slipped them on. The fabric molded around her fingers as if it was liquid. She flexed her fingers, made a fist. Then she went out to join the others at the hatch.

“Haoun’s going to stay onboard and make sure we’re ready to jet,” Mykah said as he handed comm bracelets around to everyone else. Vezali snapped hers high up on one of her tentacles, where it looked like a garter.

“Raena and I have some girl stuff to do,” Coni told him. “Comm us when you need us.”

Mykah glanced from one to the other of them. “Sure,” he said, puzzled.

“I’m looking for an extra life support part,” Vezali said.

Everyone turned to stare at her. “Kidding.” She held up two tentacles and made a gentling motion. “I’ve got some siblings here I want to visit.”

“How many siblings do you have?” Raena asked.

“Seventy-one, still living. Three of them are in the consular service here.”

Raena nodded, keeping her face blank. One of these days, she really was going to have to do more research on her crewmates and learn what she could about their species.

Haoun joined them at the hatch. “Have fun out there and keep your heads down.”

“Do you want us to get you anything?” Raena asked.

“I told my kids I’d send them some souvenirs.”

“We’ll see what we can find,” Coni promised. “Two boys and a girl, right?” Haoun nodded.

Yeah, Raena thought, she really was going to have to learn more about her shipmates. She’d assumed everyone else was just as unencumbered as she was.

“Ready?” Mykah asked. When he’d collected a nod from each of them, he reached forward to open the hatch.

The dockmaster stood directly outside, flanked by two armored guards. He had glossy black fur and extremely sharp teeth. “Captain Chen?” he asked.

Mykah stepped forward. “That’s me.”

He had pulled his hair back under a black scarf and shaved his face clean so he looked bland and respectable. Watching him work, Raena finally understood why the others let Mykah be the captain: he was really good at dealing with bureaucrats. Thank the stars someone could save her from that.

More guards flanked the mouth of the elevator. They were professionals, Raena noticed, clocking their visible weapons and guessing at what she couldn’t see. If they didn’t have sleep grenades, the vestibule itself must be plumbed for gas.

She wondered if she could count on the authorities to protect Mellix when he tried to leave the station, or if the soldiers resented having to stand up here on a spindle in space.

When she clustered with Coni and Vezali in a little knot, Raena noticed the right-hand guard tracked her every shift in position.

Why had he picked her out as trouble? She’d dressed down. Her scars—and muscles—were covered. She wasn’t armed except with a knife in each boot top, which any girl would carry. Capital City wasn’t weapons-free the way Kai had been, but the permitting process was complicated and time-consuming if you wanted to carry an energy weapon. Raena hadn’t wanted to test her new identity.

Mykah joined them at last, zipping his handheld into the pocket in the back of his jacket. When he shouldered the jacket on, Raena noticed the guards took a pointed interest in him as well.

Coni waited until the four of them were in the elevator car and going down before she muttered, “Even humans have rights.”

Mykah took her hand and nodded toward the camera in the corner of the car.

“How many elevators are there here?” Raena asked conversationally.

“Two completed and others under construction,” Mykah answered. “Both share the same train station and waiting room.”