The Wraith's Story (BRIGAND Book 1) (6 page)

From then on she stopped calling me 'Stupid Girl'. I was still 'Little Wraith' sometimes, but the way she said it was different, almost endearing.

After two days, Cutter's nerves were getting to us both and she told me it was no longer safe for us to stay there, even if my wounds weren't fully healed. She'd heard about a large merchant ship that had been destroyed — the one with my trackers on board. She knew the Mandate would be sending more scouts into the Wards.

She found me some baggy clothes, ones that rested lightly against the healing gash along my spine. We moved deeper into the Wards, closer to Earth's old and battered surface, to places even the Confed wouldn't go. Cutter managed to come up with a couple of chips that listed us as sisters — orphans.

Cutter liked to dye her hair different colors. She changed it up every few weeks. It probably didn't make much difference, but I knew it was part of her obsession with staying agile. With my hair being black, uncommon for a Wraith, she didn't seem to feel the need to disguise me in the same way. Our eyes were usually our most obvious tell, so she taught me how to dull my vision ever so slightly, to blend with the rest of the scuts. We always coated our pale skin with a thin layer of dirt whenever we went out and we walked with a gait that, for us, bordered on clumsy. We were invisible. We were Wraiths.

Days became months, then years and I learned to live like a grit. Invisibly. We moved around a lot, finding work in small, off-grid spots. People there had never heard of Wraiths, much less seen one. I got more comfortable moving normally through the crowds, not on guard all the time. Money came to us occasionally, but she would never share with me the details of how or why. I suspected it was the Bishop, and I hoped that he was still alive. But never asked.

Cutter trained me. I learned to fight, to speak the languages of both the highborn and the Low Wards, of the Martian Irezi and the Jovian Combiners. There were seven dialects of Gutterspeak alone. I studied history and politics, the geography of the Confed. Anything I asked, she would help me find the answers. I learned. I hardened. I grew. I was clay in the hands of a master craftsman. Cutter shaped me into something the Mandate would never have comprehended, much less achieved.

And she taught me other things. Sometimes a Wraith's most powerful tool was no more complicated than a simple touch — skin on skin, deftly placed. The palm of a hand. A cheek.

Not long after my first blood, she had a local doc-shop implant a blocker so that I couldn't conceive accidentally. I tried to protest, explain that I had no need for such a thing, but her insistence bordered on abusive. So I complied, as I always did.

When I turned eighteen, Cutter bought me a man for a night. I didn't want him. I told her it wasn't necessary. Pointless in fact. But, again, I was the one who caved.

He was called Heraila. His black skin was completely smooth to the touch, with not even a stubble of hair anywhere on his chiseled frame. I approached the experience the same as my other lessons – intrigued, curious, with an open mind — but no particular expectations.

Heraila stood only a few inches taller than me. His yellow eyes shone bright with anticipation as I stripped out of my leather suit and stretched out on my cot.

"No, no this is not the way," he murmured as he knelt down and pulled me up to my knees. "I was paid to teach you art, not mechanics."

I smiled for the first time in what felt like years. Maybe it had been.

And I liked him. He purred instead of ordering, he stroked instead of striking, and he melted against me instead of pushing and prying.

I sat up on the thin cot and he knelt in front of me. He placed my hands over the drop of his waist and I hesitated for only a moment before my training took over. I thought of how Cutter showed me to tease with my wrist, with the back of my hand, before applying direct pressure with my palm. So I rubbed his stomach low, just above the knot of the cloth, with the back of my hand. I pushed my maturing breasts into his chest and counted the skips in his breath.

He moved closer to me, clearly enjoying his work, while I measured and calculated each vital response. When his breathing became rhythmic, I tore the knot free and wrapped my palm around his dick — the movement so shocking and direct from the shy dance earlier that he cried out and flung his head back.

Just as my hand moved to a faster pace up and down the length of him, he burrowed his hand into the soft folds of my sex and found a spot that made me buck against his fingers. For a few minutes I forgot about being Wraith, about the scuzzy camp we were in, and about the slit in the drapes to my right where I knew Cutter sat and watched.

I forgot it all as I arched into his hand and clung to his shoulders as he gently laid me back onto the cot. My mind swirled and clenched and released as my body fell limp to him.

When he finally entered me I only noticed a faint sensation of pain before I closed my eyes and let my mind run free for the second time. It was glorious. It was primitive. And it was mine.

For perhaps the first time in my life I lost track of time as he rested on top of me, spent and relaxed. I traced my fingertips up and down the length of his back and asked him questions about sensations, and any secrets of the male body. He laughed and complied, rolling over and illustrating in fine detail how to gently tug foreskin over the head of the penis and in some cases, inches beyond if you are Jovian, and how to tug and stroke in just the right way.

He taught me to kiss. For hours.

When we finally rested for the night and Heraila's breathing fell into the rhythms of sleep, I lay beside him and glanced to my left. Cutter's sea gray eyes bored at me from behind the red sheer curtain. She was awake and alert. And fuming.

I didn't care if I'd done it wrong. I couldn't begin to know why she could be angry, so I deliberately turned my back to her and curled against my smooth, silken man.

The following night Cutter and I were back in the crap lodging that we'd paid for a week in advance. I knew our room was so bad because she spent our meager funds on Heraila. And I tipped him extra.

She curled against me on the floor. We always slept together. She asked me to tell her about what I'd learned. So I did.

"And what about a woman?" she asked.

I raised my eyebrow in question – a move she was familiar with.

"What if you have to do the same things with a woman and not a man? You have to be prepared for whatever gets the job done. That's what we do."

I didn't bother trying to explain with words. I rolled to face her. The light from the lights outside shone in and her eyes sparkled.

Without shame or insecurity, I pulled the shirt she wore from her torso, ripping it down the middle. The scars on her body charted a path to her pleasure.

I followed her tales with my fingers. I kissed my way through tragedy and loss. My tongue traced her heartbreak until her back arched and her hips lurched in release.

In the morning I woke up changed somehow. I knew I could conquer anyone – anything. The knowledge and power and freedom of it all excited me. Cutter and I were together. And free.

For a while.

The Wards were an unforgiving place, especially if you don't have the cads. There were seven billion people living in the Lower Wards of Marajo Lift alone. Life, or what passed for it, was very cheap there. Fortunately, we had marketable skills.

Cutter rented her talents when we needed money. After a while, we started working as a team. That opened up jobs she wasn't willing to risk alone. The one's that actually paid something.

Her broker, a one-eyed scut called Ereena who ran a little grocery down the alley from our flop, learned quickly that if Cutter said it would happen, it would happen. It didn't take long before she was bringing us steady work she got from local Clubs — the gangs that ran the Lower Wards. There was lots of simple theft — information, jewelry, drugs. Cutter and I were very good at getting into places, even locked ones, and we never came close to getting caught. I doubt Ereena had the faintest clue that her freelancers could have drawn contracts worth tens of thousands up in Marajo Station.

Cutter came back to our room one night with her eyes alight. "I just talked to Ereena. We have a real job — one that will pay enough for us to get out of here. Maybe Mars. The Prefectures."

The task was simple. Get into the quarters of a Jovian Combine gas dealer. Steal a code. Disappear. Easy. The problem, of course, was the Jovians. Combiners have a monopoly on the gas mines of Jupiter. They have for centuries. And, because they live and work inside the most ferocious gravity well in the system, they've modified their genotype. A lot.

Jovians measure a meter and a bit in just about any direction you care to choose. They're thickly muscled and their bones are three times as dense as their human ancestors — about the same as basalt. Drop a Jovian into water and he will, quite literally, sink like a stone.

Not surprisingly, they're hellishly strong. Cutter's first rule of combat was simple, "Never fight if you don't have to." Her second rule was, "If you're outnumbered, charge the smallest one you can spot — unless it's a Jovian. In that case, you run or you die."

We spent a day scouting the Combiner's neighborhood in the top deck of the Wards. The Upper Wards weren't as densely packed as down below, but the streets were still crowded. The sector was mostly Jovians. Miners and merchants seemed to dominate the busy throng. Fortunately, there were enough humans around that we didn't stand out too much. We hovered, our heads tucked low, as we examined the area with our peripherals. Security, landmarks, patterns.

I wore charcoal-colored fatigue pants, the pockets useful for hiding a collection of tools and a Darter like the ones Cutter preferred. My long-sleeved shirt clung to my slim figure with a low scooped out collar in front that nicely framed the tops of my breasts. Purposefully distracting. Cutter matched me in black pants but her collar rose high on her neck. Her scars were for her, and now me, nobody else.

As we moved with the flow of the crowd, I felt a single flick of her hand against my thigh – a signal of possible danger to my right. Over my shoulder, I heard voices and a stir as a group of heavily armed men pushed through the throng.

I whispered to Cutter, "Jacks! What the hell are
they
doing here?"

Cutter threw me a quick glance in response.
Quiet
. She reached down and brushed her fingers over mine.
Wait
.

Jacks were Confed Marines and they only appeared out in the open if they were on shore leave — or a mission. Good bet this wasn't R&R. Trained for shipboard fighting, Jacks were lethal in close quarters, the least advantageous range for a Wraith.

My pulse quickened instinctively, and I used my training to soothe my body's physical reaction. After Cutter freed me from the monitors, I'd gradually become accustomed to letting my emotions, my autonomic responses, run their natural course. In the face of potential danger, adrenaline coursed through my veins and I learned to welcomed the quickening pulse, the heightened senses.

Cutter squeezed my fingers. She counted my breaths, watchful of my escalating state.

"Calm down." She murmured. "They're not here for us."

I nodded and continued walking.

The Jacks kept coming, right at us. The one in the lead wore a full Rip-Jack rig. X-armor, blackout visor, the works. He was packing two punchers, making his hands into blunt, armored fists. Because they were big and clumsy — and only useful up close, most Jacks only carried a single puncher. The busy sidewalk parted before him like water flowing around a boulder. Nobody was eager to impede this guy's progress.

My chest tightened as we drew even with them. The Rip-Jack was to my right, so close I could smell the ozone coming from the tiny fusion reactors in the punchers. I held my breath. Cutter's fingers gripped mine. If we were the target, we were dead.

The leader pushed past my right shoulder, and the three Jacks that flanked him followed. I exhaled with relief. Not us.

As they passed, I realized there was a fifth member of their little party. One of the Jacks was towing a hooded figure behind him with a carbon restraint cable looped around its neck.

The figure was tall, easily two meters, more than a head taller than me. As it passed, I took in the gray robe, the swell of breasts, the delicate wrists which were bound behind. Her pale gray skin was decorated with patterns of white dots, which circled her neck, and traveled up beneath the hood.

Cutter leaned close to my ear, "Irezi. Confed's been rounding them up. Some kind of trouble with the Prefectures."

I stared. I knew about the Martian Prefectures, but they were supposed to be a reclusive lot. Few people in the Lift Cities had ever seen an Irezi in the flesh. I certainly hadn't.

When Mars was settled, the first colonists used a variety of nanotechnologies to make survival possible. A couple of hundred years later, nanomites were part of their culture and their biology. Infusion was done in-utero and Irezis grew from birth with the augmentations the mites provided.

As the mites grew and integrated into their hosts, wiring themselves into muscles, nerves, blood vessels, they formed fractal patterns just under the skin. It was those patterns that inspired the name the Irezi's gave themselves, taken from an Old Earth word for body art.

"I wonder what she did."

Cutter relaxed her grip on my arm as the group passed us and sighed, "Aside from being Irezi? Probably nothing."

I watched the procession go. I stared at that hood over her head. An Irezi would never bother with clothing like that. On Mars, they wore little if anything. Even when they stepped into the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, they used somashells, personal containment shields that were only visible as a faint blue halo hovering a centimeter above the skin. Irezi were tall, elegant and nearly always naked, except for the living patterns that decorated their bodies.

Some Irezi could use the patterns to dazzle, even stun the unprepared. I wondered if, perhaps, that hooded cloak was for the benefit of her escort. Maybe they were afraid of her.