Enemy Games (16 page)

Jay smiled without reservation at her screen. “I wonder if the guild has a translation routine for Jjurtakish.”

“As popular as the race is for freighter work? I’m certain they do,” he responded.

The Jjurtak were slow, methodical people with an uncanny appreciation for minutia. Special adhesion patches in their three-fingered hands, six-toed feet, and body fur allowed them to cling to vertical surfaces, making them much sought-after cargo masters.

Damen linked back to Jayleia’s handheld, curious about what had her working her pad so steadily. She’d initiated a grab of public source data regarding her father.

“News?” he typed, overriding the transmission protocol so his query appeared directly on her screen. “Reply. I’ll see as you type.”

She froze for a moment, then slanted a narrow-eyed, envious glance at his unit.

He suppressed a grin.

“Traitors playing it close to the cuff,” she responded. “Few files mention my dad.”

“Good.”

“He’s alive and free or they’d saturate the media.”

“Agreed. Stand by.”

“Here we go,” Damen said aloud.

The lift slowed and stopped. They stepped past the two freighter crewmembers and out into the pandemonium of the market ring.

Damen felt Jay tense and freeze. He turned.

Her gaze darted around the ring. White lines edged her lips and she flinched at the roar of stationers rooting for what looked like a low-gravity Hazkyt match that had devolved from a game of “get the puck from the other teams’ nets” into an all-out brawl.

Damen took her arm and detected the too-fast beat of her heart. “What’s wrong?”

“The kuorls sounded like this,” she murmured. Her brow furrowed, but the wild light eased in her eyes. “Something else, too. The smell . . .”

“So many different species all in one place,” he agreed, sniffing the familiar odor. “It gets ripe.”

“I’m being flooded with adrenaline,” she replied. “I’m surprised that on a station as multiculturally and ethnically diverse as this that some part of my biology recognizes the scent of a predatory race by smell. I wonder . . .”

“Experiment later,” he said, steering her through the throng of people. “Walk now. I’ll give you a tour.”

She tossed him a look filled with reproach, but nodded.

“Market ring,” he said at her ear, deliberately dropping his tone into a suggestive purr. “Every vice and illicit thrill Federated Credits, Claugh Imperials, or precious metal can buy.”

Jayleia shivered at the electricity dancing in her blood in response to his innuendo. She settled a quelling glare on him.

He smiled, a lazy twist of gorgeous, full lips.

“Anything you want,” he continued, his pitch dropping close to a growl. “Anything at all, can be had.”

She sucked in a damnably audible breath at the rush of heat into her core. He was not talking about the junk piled in the crowded shops or on the cobbled-together vendor carts strewn haphazardly around the deck.

He chuckled.

“I can’t afford the price, Major.”

“But you are in the market,” he said, a self-satisfied smile on his handsome face.

She tried to ignore the buzz rippling along her nerves. “Did your files on me fail to mention that I am bound by an oath of celibacy until my twenty-sixth birthday?”

Damen jerked upright. “What?”

J
AYLEIA smiled at the horrified expression on Damen’s face. She’d take that as a no.

Apparently, she hadn’t lowered her voice enough. Heads turned in their direction. It struck her as she cataloged the knowing grins and appraising stares. Every single person surrounding her, with the exception of Damen, bore scars. The younger the individual, the fewer scars and the more likely the person was to have all of his or her appendages intact. The older people laughing, pushing, and carousing through the colorful crowd had multiple scars, many of them indicative of major injury, including missing fingers, hands, arms, legs, and eyes in a few cases.

Damen ushered her out of the crowd, down a narrow corridor and into another lift already occupied by a snoring and, judging by the smell, drunken miner stretched out along the back wall.

“What happened to these people?” she asked. “I know you said emotional safety is more important than physical safety but this . . .”

“Mining.”

She frowned. He’d said it as if being maimed by one’s profession made complete sense.

Feeling Damen’s gaze intent upon her, Jayleia glanced at him.

“You took the Temple’s oath of celibacy?”

“Yes.” She met his eye and had to swallow the urge to smile at his disconcerted scowl. She had no intention of telling him she’d turn twenty-six within the week.

Was that anger she detected in his eye?

The lift stopped.

He stalked out, his features tight.

She followed and opened her mouth to tease him again about trusting incomplete data.

He pulled her to his side before a door. It was violet, a hue so saturated, it vibrated as if the color had been created for a species with photoreceptive sensory organs tuned to a different spectrum than her own.

The door pinged and opened.

Damen led her into the cool, dim interior.

A man with short hair dyed bright green sat in a wheelchair, his back to them, before an array of holo-screens and computer consoles.

Jay stopped, brought up short by the pressure building in her chest, and by the blaring sense of familiarity with the layout of the displays.

The man grabbed the wheels of his chair and turned around.

Stunned, she rocked back on her heels. Her breath died.

“Tahem,” she choked.

Tahem Acquival. Olive complexion, lively, light brown eyes marred by a hint of petulance, and a beautifully sculpted chest and torso. He’d been the love of Omorle Lin’s life and a fixture in Jayleia’s until Omorle’s death.

A dizzy sense of displacement assailed her.

What was he doing on Silver City and how did he know Damen well enough to have given him a pet name?

“Jay, sweetheart,” Tahem said, a sly smile on his handsome face. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you. It’s been what? Four years?”

“You know . . .” Damen began, looking between them, then broke off. He rubbed a hand down his face. “Of course you know one another.”

Tahem chuckled, the sound sharp and bitter. “Your girlfriend adored the man I loved, hizzett. We all but adopted her while she was still a gawky and hopeless teenager. Speaking of which, breathe, Jayleia. I’ve denied station medical personnel access to my quarters for years. I won’t change that even for you. Don’t pass out.”

Jayleia pulled in a badly needed breath, fumbled to a chair, and dropped into it. She scowled and realized why the computer config felt so familiar. It was Omorle’s code-running layout. A part of her heard his smooth, rich voice saying, “I’m going in. Watch my back.”

She hadn’t heard that voice or those words in more than six years.

Swallowing hard, she spun her chair away from the displays, her eyes and chest burning.

Damen shifted.

She glanced at him. Concern stood out in the faint lines in his forehead.

Tahem looked between them, then held a hand out to Damen. “We’ll take care of business, shall we?”

Nodding, Damen gave him the metal canister containing the crystal.

“Coded to you,” Damen said.

Tahem grunted, unlocked and opened the tube. “Radioactivity?”

“Not native in this state.”

“You found this at the coordinates I gave you?” Tahem asked.

“Yes.”

“What else?”

Damen shot a look at her.

Tahem laughed. “Hizzett, Jay is family, even if it takes her father’s disappearance to bring her to visit me.”

She jerked upright. He knew about her father? How? And what specifically did he know?

“We found indications of a base or a research station,” Damen said.

Scowling, she forced her attention to the conversation and to the man in the wheelchair debriefing a Claugh agent while examining the crystal, a crystal he’d sent Damen after. Had the United Mining and Ore Processing Guild developed its own spy program? And co-opted a Claugh agent in the process? Or had the Claugh co-opted a UMOPG agent?

“A station? Under whose auspices?” Tahem demanded.

“We didn’t have time to find out.”

“What is that?” she asked, nodding at the crystal.

Tahem pressed his lips tight, glanced at her, and shook his head. “A death sentence.”

A moment of fear knifed through her sternum. “For whom?”

“That remains to be seen,” he replied, his tone grim.

It made her look closer. Studying Tahem, she realized he’d abandoned his masks. Interest lined his face. Professional, intent curiosity focused his attention on the crystal before him.

He’d let his bitter, sullen cover slip. It would be deadly in front of an enemy. Something, she realized, she could all too easily be.

“You’re showing,” Jay said, repeating the phrase her father had used whenever his spies blew their covers.

Tahem muttered, “Baxt’k.”

Damen eased into the chair beside hers and looked between the pair as if studying a new life-form.

Tahem glared. The hard set of his features eased and he nodded once, acknowledging her warning. He arranged his features into the familiar, practiced pout he’d worn until derailed by professional interest.

Two spies trading advice, save he had yet to offer any.

“What happened, Tahem,” she asked, “that you’re in that chair?”

“Do you know,” he began in a falsely conversational tone, setting the crystal in his lap and crossing his forearms, his elbows propped on the arms of his chair. “When Omorle was assigned to guard you, he said he’d always wanted a daughter and that no matter what, if something happened to one of us, the other could take comfort in you. How can I do that? How? You’re nothing like him!”

She wilted and looked away. “No. I don’t suppose I am.”

“You loved him,” Tahem said, his accusation sounding muted by too many conflicting emotions.

“I still do.” She shrugged. “So do you. I was a child, Tahem.”

Jayleia gathered her courage to meet his eye. “You were the first people to treat me like me. Not like my father’s daughter. Of course I adored Omorle. I even harbored a crush on you for a while. Or didn’t you know?”

A surprised smile touched his face. “You’ve never been an easy read, sweetheart.”

He picked up the crystal and shook it at her, grinning. “Omorle would have yelled his head off at me about this chair. The fact that I’m in it is my own damned fault.”

“Let me get you an anti-grav . . .”

“No,” he said, his tone final. “I want to remember every time I move that I did this to myself. I want the sores that come from planting my paralyzed butt in this contraption day after day.”

Jay blinked at Damen. She had no idea where she stood with her mentor’s widowed lover. She hoped Damen had a better read on him.

The light in Damen’s gray eyes captured her, and she found the heat rising through her body. She frowned.

“You,” Tahem said into the silence.

Shaking off the tug of sensual awareness, she locked on to Tahem in time to see him studying the pair of them, a thoughtful—and was that pained—look on his face.

He pointed at Damen.

“Something’s shifted in you,” Tahem said.

“What?” Damen demanded. His tone said that Damen felt the truth of Tahem’s observation, but didn’t know what it signified.

Jayleia’s heart stuttered. Had he been bitten and infected after all? “What are you detecting?”

“You’re the xenobiologist.” Tahem jerked his chin at her, chuckled, turned his chair, and drove straight for the space between them. “You figure it out.”

Scowling, she lifted a foot and locked it on his left wheel. Tahem’s chair stopped. The one-sided braking turned him to face her.

“Go ahead. Come between us,” she challenged. Gods. He couldn’t hide the longing in his eyes. Tahem had fallen for Damen.

Were they really here again? Competing for the affections of one man?

Jay started. Was she? Really?

Apparently, her cover had slipped, too.

Tahem laughed outright at whatever he saw in her face. “You were always hopeless when it came to men.”

“Men?” she echoed. It occurred to her. He wasn’t talking about Damen, which meant he knew the true reason she’d been exiled from her mother’s world. Mortification hit her in a rush. “How did . . .”

Tahem waved off the question. “It was Omorle’s business to know, sweetheart. Neither of us bought the story explaining your expulsion from the Temple. We dug up the truth for ourselves.”

Jayleia glanced at Damen’s patently neutral expression and suppressed a groan. “Thanks for challenging him to go digging through my past again.”