Heaven's Queen (22 page)

Once I managed to get my scattered thoughts back together, that bothered me. “You sure? Those Eyes were serious about killing you. Are you really happy about being on the run?”

“Absolutely,” Rupert said without missing a beat. He propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at me like this was the most important thing he’d ever said. “I love you and I believe in what you’re doing. You’ve given me more purpose and happiness in the last few months than I’d found in sixty years. I thought I’d lost everything when I lost you, and I was prepared to spend the rest of my life making amends, but then you forgave me.” His voice sounded incredulous, like he still couldn’t believe that was true. “You forgave the unforgivable, welcomed me back into your arms, and you ask if I’m happy?” He broke into a boyish grin. “Do I really have to answer that?”

I grinned back, mortified as a blush spread over my cheeks. “Just making sure.”

“You can be
absolutely
sure,” Rupert said, leaning down to kiss me again. “I would rather be on the run with you than anywhere else in the universe.”

“Even if it gets you shot?”

Rupert’s grin turned devilish. “If it gets me the same reaction you showed tonight, I’ll get shot as much as possible.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” I snapped, smacking him on the chest. “I’m serious, Rupert.”

“I’m serious, too,” he said, reaching down to brush my damp hair away from my face. “I’m in this with you to the end, Devi. No matter what happens, no matter who comes after you, so long as you want me at your side, that’s where I’ll be.” He leaned down, pressing his lips against my forehead. “You are the future I want, and I will never surrender you to anyone.”

I closed my eyes as he whispered against me, only now it was in shame, not pleasure. I shouldn’t be letting Rupert make those promises to me. I might have finally given in to my feelings, but nothing had actually changed. I was still going to die, and since I believed him when he said he wasn’t letting me go, I was now certain Rupert would be there when it happened. That actually upset me more than the idea of my own death, because I’d probably end up getting him killed, too.

I wanted to explain this to him, to warn him, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Rupert was no idiot; he knew this was a doomed endeavor. Hell, he’d already paid the price for sticking by me in blood, and he was still determined to stay. Even if I could make him leave, I didn’t want to let him go, and that shamed me more than anything. It was one thing to be weak and give in to love, but it was another altogether to be a selfish bitch who would rather keep her lover in danger with her than go without.

But just as I was getting really upset, Rupert settled into the bed, pulling me into his arms. Even after the last several hours, the intimacy was new and delightful, and I decided my self-recriminations could wait. Soon enough the jump would end and we’d be thrust back into reality. Until then, though, I was determined to savor every second.

I reached out, snaking my arms around Rupert and pulling myself tight. I felt him raise his head in question, but I didn’t look up. Instead, I clung to him belligerently, pressing my face into his chest as I forced everything else out of my head until all that remained was the deep contentedness of lying in the dark with someone you loved. And it was in that quiet happiness that I gave in to my exhaustion, falling asleep with my lips pressed over Rupert’s heart.

I woke to the hyperspace exit alarm. That in itself was nothing unusual, but the fact that Rupert was still in bed with me was. “Hi,” he said softly, leaning down to kiss me.

I kissed him back, marveling. It felt so strange to be openly affectionate like this. Wonderful, but strange and a little reckless, like we were tempting fate, probably because we were. “Which alarm was that?” I asked when he broke away.

“Ten-minute warning,” he answered, sliding out of bed and padding over to the flight console to turn off the alarm. I gave myself a long moment to gaze appreciatively at his naked back before I made myself get up as well, wincing when my tired muscles protested. The phantoms were still floating in the corner where I’d left them, though they’d stopped waving now. I rolled my eyes and put my back to them, facing the bathroom as I kneeled down to check my clothing.

It was a short inspection. Between the disrupter blast, Rupert’s blood, and the dirty snow, everything I’d worn yesterday was ruined. I sighed, wondering if I was going to have to go meet this doctor in my underwear when I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

I looked exhausted and pale, which was to be expected, but what really got my attention was my hair. It had been down when I’d fallen asleep, the wavy mess too wet and tangled to even put in a ponytail. Now, two neat brown plaits framed my face.

“You braided my hair?” I called, looking over my shoulder. “Why?”

“Because it was beautiful and soft,” Rupert answered, giving me a
duh
look.

I looked back at the mirror, turning my head from side to side. As someone who’d struggled her whole life with it, I knew exactly how long it must have taken him to coax my crazy, fluffy hair into those two neat braids. Actually, maybe I didn’t, because Rupert had done a better job than I’d ever managed. He’d woven my brown hair back and down in two perfect halves, keeping the braid loose so the tines of my helmet’s neuronet wouldn’t snag but still tight enough to make sure no curls escaped to get in my eyes. How he’d managed to do it without waking me I would never know, but then, he would have had plenty of time to work it out, considering he couldn’t sleep next to me.

“You must have been crazy bored,” I said, flipping my new braids over my shoulders.

“Quite the opposite,” Rupert said, walking back to the bed. “You were very entertaining. Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

“Really?” I frowned. “No one’s ever mentioned that before.”

Rupert smiled wide as he leaned over the bed to snatch up his bag. “Maybe I just make you more comfortable than they did.”

From anyone else, that would have sounded smug. This was Rupert, though, so it just sounded like the truth. “Maybe,” I agreed. “I didn’t say anything embarrassing, did I?”

“No,” Rupert said. “It was cute.”

Not many people called anything I did “cute,” but Rupert’s judgment was historically impaired when it came to me, so I decided to just accept the compliment. I was about to ask him if we had any ration bars left when he pulled out a folded parcel and tossed it at me. “Here.”

I caught it without thinking, but when I looked down, I was astonished to see I was holding a man’s underarmor shirt. Rupert tossed me a pair of fatigues next, the same type and size I’d grabbed for myself before we’d fled Anthony’s cruiser. When he pulled out another, larger set for himself, I could only shake my head in astonishment. “I can’t believe you thought to bring all this.”

“Symbionts go through a lot of clothes,” Rupert replied, reaching back to pull his long hair into a ponytail. “You learn to overpack.”

The clean clothes felt marvelous against my skin. I would have killed for a shower, but I wasn’t about to trust the Caravaner’s. Anyway, a shower would have required unbraiding my hair, and I was suddenly very disinclined to undo Rupert’s painstaking work.

While I put on my boots, Rupert packed up the bunk. Not surprisingly, he folded everything, neatly organizing all the blankets and towels I’d pulled out when we first got on into stacks before stowing them back in their cabinets. He set us in order, too, giving me our last ration bar, a sacrifice I would have been more impressed with if I hadn’t known how much he hated the things. He even found the Caravaner’s tiny supply of potable water, which I hadn’t even realized was there. The water would have been far more useful last night, but I was happy enough to get anything to drink.

As I sat in the navigator’s chair, eating my ration and drinking my small cup of water that tasted like it had been sitting in a plastic tank for ten years while Rupert tapped at the flight console beside me, I couldn’t help marveling at how easily I’d fallen into the couple routine. I’d expected to wake up to crippling regret, but I didn’t regret a thing. I didn’t even feel guilty. Quite the opposite, I felt proud sitting next to Rupert, ready to take on the universe. There could be an army waiting for us on the other side of this jump, and I almost wished there would be. I was eager to fight, to challenge anyone who thought they could take this new, wonderful thing I’d found with Rupert away from me. Weaknesses? Screw ’em. If anyone tried to use Rupert against me, I would pound their goddamn face in.

Okay, I knew that wasn’t actually a viable long-term solution, but I didn’t care. Right now, I felt like I could take down a team of Devastators using only my teeth.

Rupert glanced over at me, lifting his dark eyebrows. “You look happy.”

“Just readjusting some priorities,” I answered, cracking my knuckles. “So where are we, anyway?”

“I don’t actually know if it has a name,” Rupert said. “We’re outside of Republic borders.”

I gave him a skeptical look. “What kind of doctor lives in open space?”

“You’ll see in a second,” he said as the final alarm sounded.

I grabbed my seat as the jump flash washed over our ship, bringing with it that awful feeling of being sucked back into reality as we left hyperspace and reemerged into the universe. I looked around expectantly as soon as the light faded, but I didn’t see anything that could give me a hint of what kind of place we’d arrived at. In fact, I didn’t see much of anything at all. We’d emerged into what looked like deep space. I didn’t see a planet or a moon or even a sun, just a wall of unfamiliar stars shining like little penlights in the deep, deep blackness. I was about to ask Rupert if the Kessel gate had jumped us to the wrong place when he caught my eye and pointed down.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much of a pilot. Years of working on-planet and on-ship had taught me to keep my eyes straight. Unless my suit tipped me off, I didn’t tend to look down when I was searching for things because xith’cal didn’t normally spring up from under your feet. But space was another matter. Out here, down was as valid as any other direction, and when I followed Rupert’s lead, what I saw made me gasp.

Directly below our little ship was an enormous space station. Or at least, I assumed it was a space station. I’d never actually seen anything like the glittering structure hanging in the blackness like a work of art. From above, it was shaped like a galaxy with long arms radiating out in a spiral from a relatively tiny central hub, but when Rupert flew us closer, I saw that the spiral was actually stretched out. Instead of being a flat disk, the long arms were curved both up and down, so that from the side it looked like a sphere. It was the strangest, most beautiful setup for a space station I’d ever seen, but weirdest of all was the fact that every one of those long, gently curving tubes looked to be made entirely of clear glass.

Inside the clear tubes, people walked on the sloping surfaces at all different directions. Some tubes had gravity on the bottom relative to our position, but in others the people seemed to be walking upside down. Still others looked to have no gravity at all. I was starting to wonder if they were having some kind of malfunction when I realized that all the people inside those clear tubes were wearing the brightest, most ridiculously fluttery outfits I’d ever seen.

“God and king,” I muttered, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s that space church place, isn’t it? Nova’s home.”

“The Church of the Cosmos,” Rupert said with a nod. “They have several stations, actually, but this is their main facility.”

“And
this
is where your doctor is hiding?” I hadn’t meant that to come out quite so skeptical, but I just couldn’t reconcile the idea of a doctor who’d worked with Maat living in the same place that had produced someone like Nova. Then again, the Church of the Cosmos had also produced Nic, who’d been hard enough to run with Brenton, and their dad
was
supposed to be some kind of church leader who knew both Caldswell and Brenton, so I guessed it made sense that—

“Oh no,” I moaned, flopping back in my chair. “It’s Nova’s dad, isn’t it?”

Rupert nodded.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I cried. “I mean, why not just say ‘we’re going to see Dr. Starchild’ instead of ‘the doctor’ or whoever. It wouldn’t have put me off. I like Nova, remember?”

“Old habits die hard,” Rupert confessed. “We never talk about him. Dr. Starchild’s affiliation with the Eyes is a deeply held secret. I only know about him because I’m old enough to remember his departure. The newer Eyes have no idea the head of the Church of the Cosmos was ever part of our operation.”

I looked up at the glittering station in front of us. “Why is it such a big deal? I can understand the Eyes not wanting Dr. Starchild to talk about
them
, but why wouldn’t they talk about
him
?”

“Because of what he did,” Rupert said. “Dr. Starchild was with the Eyes from the very beginning. He knew enough to bury our entire organization, but he wanted out. When the Eyes refused to let him go, he loaded all that damning knowledge, and proof that it was true, onto satellites, which he then hid throughout the galaxy to use as blackmail. Unless they wanted the story of Maat, her daughters, and the phantoms sent to all the major news organizations, the Eyes had no choice but to let him make a clean break.”

I whistled, impressed. A stunt like that took serious guts. It was also surprisingly ruthless, though I could completely understand why the Eyes would never want his name mentioned again after getting shown up so badly. What I didn’t understand was: “How the hell is he still alive? This place is so isolated it would be an easy hit, so why haven’t the Eyes taken him out?”

Rupert chuckled. “Believe me, there are plenty of Eyes who think we should destroy this place, including our current commander. Fortunately for Dr. Starchild, they can’t afford to. He’s the only person left in the universe who understands exactly how the plasmex part of Maat’s prison works.”

A cold shiver ran up my spine. “And why is that?”