Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (6 page)

He held the light awkwardly, pointed toward the side of his face with his off hand. Raena slipped sideways, so he couldn’t flash the light her way and blind her.

He was no boy. Warm brown eyes nestled amidst crows-feet above a tousled red-gold beard.

“No,” she said sadly. “You only remind me of someone I used to know.” Raena turned toward the mouth of the tomb, eager to make good the escape for which she had waited so long.

“Where will you go?” the grave robber asked desperately, trying to slow her down. “It’s a rock out there. Barren. You can’t get off-world without our help.”

She laughed—and recognized that the sound wasn’t entirely sane. “You’re grave robbers. You’re going to help me?”

“We’re archaeologists,” the man lied. “We work for Gavin Sloane.”

Her response startled her. As if the whole relationship she’d been imagining between them had been real, she asked, “Gavin? Still alive?”

“I’m here, Raena,” Sloane said calmly. He switched on a torch, angled down at his feet.

“Is it really you?” Raena begged.

“It’s really me.” He crossed the room to her, engulfed her in his arms.

She clung to Sloane as if she were drowning. His beard was scratchy against her cheek. One of his hands cupped her butt and squeezed, which seemed at odds with the pair of kisses that had been all they’d shared in the brief time they’d actually known each other. Perhaps he’d been imagining a relationship with her as well, all the time she’d been imprisoned.

Still, she’d been a slave. She knew how to respond to the arousal of her masters. She owed her rescue to Gavin Sloane and his team of “archaeologists.” She leaned against his body, pressing her hip against his groin with an excitement more calculated than his. She got just the reaction she intended to.

Sloane led her toward the door of the tomb. He handed her a helmet with a full-face screen. “The air is full of grit,” he warned, “bits of Templar stone. It will slice through any exposed skin.”

She slipped the helmet on, accepted the cloak that he gave her as well. She wondered if he would kick the chocks loose as they passed the tomb’s slab, but he didn’t seal his men inside. Nor did he spare time to help with the wounded, she noticed, not even to acknowledge them or say goodbye.

Instead, he escorted Raena to an opulently appointed yacht. Once he had her strapped safely into the copilot’s chair, he lifted the ship from the rock. At the edge of the atmosphere, he turned the yacht back toward the planet. He released a barrage of missiles, destroying the tombs and the men left behind on the planet below.

“Thallian would have used the encampment to connect your rescue to me. He would torture Kavanaugh’s men in an effort to find you. This is kinder,” Sloane explained. “At least this is quick.”

Raena knew the sort of agony the men would face, when Thallian tried to hunt her down. It probably was safer to kill them now. Still, she had liked Kavanaugh. She was sorry he was dead. She turned toward Sloane and shot him with the gun she’d taken from the fallen archaeologists. If Thallian could connect her to Sloane, she needed to get away from him as quickly as possible. She unhooked the crash restraints and dragged Sloane’s body back to the airlock.

She’d always been happier running alone anyway.

Coni was taking a shift in the cockpit while the others slept. The puzzle of piecing together a new identity for Raena was more entertaining than she expected. For once, during her shift, she wasn’t the least bit sleepy.

After they’d hijacked the
Veracity
from the Thallians, Coni had seen Raena’s Imperial wanted poster and the recording of her trial in its log. It surprised Coni how much more information she could find about the little assassin in the Imperial archives. Following up on the crimes Raena had been accused of opened up all sorts of records. Fascinating reading, if one had the patience to wade through the human-centric propaganda.

The old files inspired the new biography Coni was writing for Raena. She wanted to tie in planets that Raena had actually visited, skills she honestly possessed.

The work felt like compiling an ironclad telenovel. Coni found wry amusement in using the search capabilities of the
Veracity’
s computers to craft this elegant fiction.

Then again, Mykah had been the one who changed the ship’s name from the
Raptor
to the
Veracity
—and he’d encouraged Coni to add another false record of sale atop the
Raptor
’s already complicated series of falsified registrations. After the Thallians had illegally prevented the
Raptor
from being melted down as war surplus, they obscured their ownership for fifteen years. The ship’s current crew was only continuing that tradition. Coni loved Mykah enough to make sure the final transaction moving the ship into his possession looked very, very legal. She’d even refinanced a fake loan on the ship, then paid it off in reality with part of the bounty they’d claimed on the Thallians.

All the same, Coni was aware of the difference between the literal truth and the apparent truth. She had never had any aspirations to becoming a journalist, as Mykah had. She hadn’t even really planned to become a hacker. She had only wanted to protect the ship and its crew to the best of her abilities.

Some strange noise raised Coni’s hackles. She reached out one finger to mute the Haru singer she had been listening to.

There it was again: a quiet voice, a note of protest, raised in the sleep of one of her crewmates.

Coni had forgotten she’d turned on the speaker for the monitor in Raena’s cabin. Thank the stars one of her crewmates hadn’t caught her spying. She reached over now and turned on the picture.

Raena was alone in her cabin, of course. Coni couldn’t imagine anyone keeping her company, although she supposed Mykah might have, if asked. No, Raena lay in her bunk, sleeping face down, arms wrapped around her pillow.

The quiescent monitor screen in Raena’s cabin cast bloody red light across her skin. She was bare from nape of neck to the ribs, but weird shadows striped her skin. Was it a tattoo? Coni tried to make out the image, but the video resolution was too grainy for clarification.

Raena whispered again. She stiffened, straightened her legs, and the shift of her body propelled her from the nightmare.

Coni toggled the monitors off. Her surveillance felt intrusive now, too intimate. It was one thing to watch Raena awake and moving about in her gym—and another entirely to spy on her as she awoke from a nightmare.

Why was she doing this, Coni asked herself. Of all the illegal things she did for her shipmates, spying on Raena was by far the one that felt the worst.

Raena opened her eyes on her darkened cabin. Only the power light of her screen glowed, a cheery red light in the shadows. She rolled over, chasing sleep. Of course, it wouldn’t come back.

That wasn’t how it went
, she thought. Gavin hadn’t come down to the tombworld to get her. He’d been waiting in his base on one of the planet’s moons. When she’d shown up there with Kavanaugh and a couple of Gavin’s bodyguards as an escort, Gavin hadn’t recognized her. He accused her of working for Ariel.

With eyes closed, Raena could picture it all again: the ludicrous white fur carpet, the crystal glass from which she’d drunk her first sip of water in twenty years, the pretty girl with the big gun who stood guard for her boss. Gavin had a beard then, like he did in her dream, but he seemed younger in her true memory than he had in the dream just now, even though the drug he’d been addicted to at the time had whittled him down to little more than a skeleton.

Weird. Now that she pondered it, the man she’d identified as Gavin in her dream didn’t really look much like him at all.

Anyway, why was Kavanaugh getting dragged into her dreams? She wondered if he understood how much danger Sloane had put him in. When Kavanaugh opened her tomb, Raena had been just as disoriented as she had been in the dream. She marveled now that she hadn’t simply killed Kavanaugh and his men just for startling her. At the time, it hadn’t seemed necessary.

Thinking about it now, Raena finally appreciated how much she had changed during her imprisonment.

Poor Kavanaugh
, she thought. She’d always liked him. He seemed like an honestly good-hearted person, fair and reliable, maybe too kind to survive in the galaxy. At least she’d avenged his death in her dream.

Raena got out of bed to splash some water on her face.

Why was her subconscious bringing up Kavanaugh and her escape from the tomb now?

Yeah, she was sorry that she’d ended things with Kavanaugh with her fist to his head. Tarik didn’t deserve to be left unconscious on the floor of Ariel’s ship. When she was leaving them behind on Kai, Raena had been angry at being spied upon by her supposed friends. She’d been in a hurry to steal the
Raptor
and get off Kai before Planetary Security caught up to her. She was supposed to meet Mykah and the crew. The clock was ticking.

She ought to apologize to Kavanaugh, but she wasn’t sure how to look him up. What would she say, anyway? Sorry you were in my way?

Poor Kavanaugh. He deserved better friends.

The dream circled around and around in her thoughts. Raena shook her head, trying to shake the dream images away. Her mind just wouldn’t clear.

Disgusted with herself, she went to dress. She might as well get some use out of the day. Maybe she could get Vezali’s help making some modifications to her gym to make working out more of a challenge.

The lights flickered on in welcome as Raena stepped into her gym. She stood in the doorway, wondering whether she knew the room well enough that she could work out in the dark.

She stepped back into the passageway and opened the panel by the door, hitting the switch to kill the lights.

That didn’t make the room completely dark, she realized. Light still filtered through the windowpane on the door. She caught herself wondering how to turn out the passage lights. Right. She could blackout the whole ship and creep around in the dark. Her crewmates would be sure to understand that.

Were the disruptions to her sleep making her irrational? Not, she supposed, as long as she recognized the craziness before she acted on it.

What was she trying to do, anyway? Hurt herself? What did she have to prove? She was never, ever going to be anywhere that was completely dark again, if she could help it.

She flipped the gym’s lights back on. Maybe she could heat the room up, find a way to make it humid. She wanted to exhaust her muscles with running and vaults. Movement. The illusion of flight. She wanted to tire herself out to the point of sleeping without dreams.

Coni waited until she was sure Raena was occupied before she switched off all her monitors and pinged Haoun to wake up for his shift. Then she backed up her notes and went to catch some sleep.

The sound of their door opening roused Mykah, who smiled sleepily at her. He inched over in their bunk, making room, as she hung up her jacket and stepped out of her skirt. Coni slipped under the coverlet and snuggled close to Mykah, breathing him in. The salty metallic smell of his body had turned her stomach when she met him on Kai, but she’d gotten used to it. Usually she found it erotic, but her brain was too tired to act on her impulses now.

Mykah stroked his fingers through the fur under her chin. “How’d you spend your evening?”

“Raena has me setting up a new identity for her,” Coni said sleepily.

“Really?”

“Well, it’s only sort of new. She wants to keep her name and masquerade as her own daughter. But she wants a birth certificate and school transcripts and some record of herself as a real person in the galaxy.”

“That seems reasonable,” Mykah said. “She can’t really leave the ship on any sort of civilized world. If she gets picked up for anything, there are going to be questions about who she is and where she’s been. If they run a DNA trace on her and find out who she was, they’re going to connect her to Thallian—and she’s going to stand trial for his crimes unless she can prove her imprisonment. And we didn’t find any evidence of that. Did we?”

“No,” Coni said. “We have her word that she was imprisoned all those years, along with the knowledge she had of the grave robbing and the recording she hacked of the avalanche that killed Thallian’s men. But we don’t have any evidence that she was actually imprisoned in that tomb.”

“Except that she’s physically twenty,” Mykah pointed out. “She hasn’t aged since the War, so some kind of Templar tech was involved.”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Coni said. “She says the Templar stone kept everything inside it from rotting or falling apart. Does that mean it’s like a super-refrigerator, cold inside? Or does that mean that it warps time somehow?”

“Whoa,” Mykah said. “Are you serious? You think the Templar stone warps time?”

“I don’t know. There’s no research on it, but that’s not unusual. There’s so little research on most Templar tech. Let’s say that it does warp time somehow. That would explain her apparent age. Maybe if we all slept inside Templar caves, we could become immortal.”

“That would be a story to unveil,” Mykah said, yawning.

“Except that who would want to be immortal?” Coni argued. “I don’t know what other use the time warping might be …”

She realized that Mykah had fallen back to sleep already. She curled up against him, her face buried in his shoulder, breathing his salty metallic smell. This was home to her now.

CHAPTER 4