Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (15 page)

“Ah,” Coni said. That was an affectation copied from Mykah’s speech. “And you didn’t want to ask him about it?”

Actually, Raena was still trying not to be alone with Mykah, although she didn’t want to admit that to his girlfriend. She had wondered if the subject of his relationship with Mellix was too private for a mealtime conversation, which was why Mykah dodged it at breakfast. Instead, she said, “I thought maybe you would be more honest.”

“Mykah would be honest with you. It’s just that the others already know that Mellix was his advisor at university. Mykah was the only human in his cohort. Mellix assigned them to find a societal problem, investigate it, and assemble an exposé on it for their final project. Mykah’s project was on the institutionalized abuse of human sex workers. The rest of the cohort parlayed their less-controversial exposés into internships in the media. No one would broadcast Mykah’s.”

“Because his subjects were human?”

Coni settled down at the table and began to eat. “That’s what Mykah believes,” she said between nibbles. “Mellix ended up hiring Mykah for a semester, so Mykah could finish his requirements and get his degree. Together they did an exposé on chronic illness amongst migrant farmworkers. It won several awards.”

Raena found it interesting to discover there was a darker side to their affable captain. “How did Mykah end up working on Kai, then?”

“He didn’t want to be merely a cameraman or a research assistant. He wanted to be on camera. But Mellix warned Mykah that if he took a job in the human media, he’d be ghettoized and never find anything else. Once he turned down the few offers he got from Earth, no one else would hire him. Until he started handling your interview requests, no one would even return his calls.”

“Is that so?” No wonder he was so thrilled to be doing interviews in her place, Raena thought. Finally, he was getting the attention for his work that he wanted. She wondered if he was actually appearing in the news footage or if the nonhuman media personalities merely quoted him as a source.

Afterward, Raena sequestered herself in her cabin, sweating over every repetitive exercise she could think of. She didn’t know how else to pass the time.

The longer she worked, the stronger she became—which was good. Unfortunately, the long stretches of solitude gave her too much time to mull over the false memories. As she studied their details, she began to lose certainty of what events had really happened and which hadn’t.

If there were two Gavins, as in the memory of being drugged by him in the souk, she knew she could easily discount it. The other hallucinations, though, where things were only subtly out of place, were harder for her to be sure of. Maybe what she thought she remembered was wrong.

She decided she needed to start keeping a log, just so she could chart if the false memories also mutated over time.

An audio log seemed too personal, though, and she already suspected Coni monitored her. Talking to herself, even to tell her own life story, was going to raise suspicions. So Raena spent the long hours that she couldn’t sleep noting things down in the code she and Ariel had used to communicate when they were kids. It wouldn’t fool Coni for long, once she got interested in it, and
that
would make Raena look even crazier than talking to herself might. All the same, it entertained Raena and in a strange way, it comforted her, too.

I come by my paranoia honestly
, she told herself.
It’s honed by way too many years on the run.

Still, in all the time she had been trying to escape Thallian, she had never felt the need to make a record of her existence. If anything, she had wanted to be erased as soon as the universe could arrange it.

Now, she wanted to leave some kind of record behind—in case these horrible, unraveling dreams began to happen to someone else.

“Raena’s having trouble sleeping,” Mykah said into Coni’s shoulder as he cuddled into her in bed.

Coni wanted to say, “I know,” but she couldn’t figure out how to, without admitting that she had been spying on their crewmate. “Is she feeling cooped up on the ship?” seemed a safe question to ask.

“I don’t know. I get the feeling that maybe she doesn’t know what to do with herself, without someone giving her orders. She doesn’t seem to have developed any hobbies, other than working out.”

“And now you’ve taken her gym away.”

“Yeah.”

Coni shifted to take better advantage of his touch and lost the thread of the conversation momentarily.

When at last she’d caught her breath again, she said, “You know what I think?”

Mykah chuckled sleepily.

“Well, yes, that, too,” Coni agreed. “I think Raena would sleep better with company.”

“Are you volunteering?” Mykah wondered.

Coni laughed. “I’m volunteering you.”

“Yikes, Coni, how can you say that?”

“I just thought … you’re both human. You would fit together.” She wondered over his hesitance, then asked, “You’re not afraid of Raena, are you?”

“Only in bed,” he answered.

Fair enough, Coni supposed. She’d seen what Raena labeled as love marks.

“I know what she’s capable of,” Mykah said as he flopped over onto his stomach. “I know she’s been gentle with me, relatively speaking, when we spar. I’m kind of in awe of her, but I never thought of her …”

Coni stopped his mouth with hers. She kissed him seriously enough that she felt the conflict leave his body. She smiled and leaned back so he could meet her eyes. “If you do,” she said softly, “if she needs you, I’m fine with it.”

“Why?”

Coni considered the question, then decided on the simplest answer: “I like her.” She didn’t say, “I feel sorry for her,” because she knew how Mykah felt about that.

Eventually it got late enough that Raena crawled into bed. Her muscles ached, but in a way that made her happy. She closed her eyes and prayed for oblivion to take her.

The dream got to her first.

Raena didn’t know where the Viridians were leading her, but she was grateful it didn’t require any more of the horrific suffocating cloth they’d used when they captured her. She walked in the midst of a pod of them to a doorway.

Beyond the door stretched a large, bright open space. Raena stepped into it, blinking, and heard the door whoosh closed behind her.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw a rack of weapons in the middle of the space. She recognized staves, shields, edged weapons of various lengths and weights.

She seemed to be alone in the room—at least, nothing else was moving. She heard the sound of voices. Somewhere, above the lights, she was being watched.

She walked over to the rack and pulled out a sword, testing its heft and balance and the way it cut through the air.

Another door opened and a woman was shoved through it. She shouted in a language Raena didn’t understand. The woman struggled to cover her body with her hands.

Only after Raena saw her did she realize that she was still naked herself. Nothing she could do about it now. She went back to examining the weapons.

A second door opened, and a third, then more. All the slaves were female. Raena didn’t pay them much attention until animals rushed out of the final door and the screaming started.

She dropped the sword to snatch up a lance tipped with a battle-axe. She decided it was better to have reach than weight in her weapon. She would’ve preferred to fight nearer to the wall, but since the doors remained invisible until they opened to spit something out, the rack of weapons was probably a better thing to have at her back. She didn’t want to get far from the weapons anyway, in case her halberd’s haft broke.

The spectacle was a bloodbath. After a while, the screaming died down and only the sounds of eating remained.

Raena eyed the last monster standing, a giant with a glassy black carapace. Its tail ended in a dripping barb. She slashed that off, before the creature knew she was behind it.

It spun toward her faster than she would have guessed possible.

She stabbed at its eyes with the halberd. It grabbed the haft in one claw and snapped it in half.

Raena clung to the broken stick with both hands as the monster dragged her forward. At the last second, she let go, rolling beneath the creature to retrieve the discarded axe head. She jammed it upward with all her strength, hacking until it wedged into a chink in the carapace.

The creature flopped over onto its back, grabbing at her with all its claws. Raena’s small size worked to her advantage. She was able to roll between the monster’s legs.

She ran back to the weapons to retrieve the sword she’d discarded earlier.

The monster squealed a single high-pitched note. Raena had never been so happy when a noise stopped.

Over a loud speaker, a voice said something she didn’t understand. What followed was a gabble of voices that sounded like an auction.

A pod of Viridians came to retrieve her from the field of battle. Raena considered the ichor-dripping sword in her hand, but one of the stick creatures showed her the control in its claw. Raena’s fingers touched the collar around her neck. She let the sword fall.

The Viridians surrounded her. She weighed attacking them—the one with the collar’s controller first—but really, she understood what was happening now. This was a slave auction. The Viridians were selling her at last. She could choose to die now, to spite them, or she could wait and see.

She was young enough to hope that whatever happened to her next would be better.

Out in the hallway beyond the arena, one of the Viridians pushed her into a tiny cubicle. After the door closed on her, she was washed, dried, and misted with perfume. When the door opened again, a Viridian handed her a heavily embroidered robe and a comb. She dressed and began to ease the tangles from her long black hair.

The pod guided her through the shadowy ship to a lavishly upholstered sitting room. A lone old man sipped from a glass with actual ice cubes in it. The Viridians surrendered the controller for her collar and faded back into the shadows.

“Hello, Raena,” he said softly. “My name is Gavin Sloane.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I can only imagine how you have been treated by the Viridians. We are going to have your collar removed right now. You will be free after that.”

“Why?”

“Because …” he began. Clearly the question caught him unprepared. “Because I knew you in another life. I want to spare you from being a slave.”

“Why didn’t you spare me from the Viridians?” she asked.

“I didn’t know where you were sold to them, but I did know when they sold you.”

That didn’t make any sense. Raena began to wonder if she were dreaming.

Sloane slipped the collar controller into the breast pocket of his flight jacket and buttoned the flap over it. He offered a hand to her. “Let’s go.”

She took his leathery hand and followed him from the Viridians’ ship. She found herself in an enormous spaceport. She and Sloane ascended a towering escalator to a platform where a serpentine transit car waited to rush people into the city on the horizon. Raena had no idea what planet they were on.

She had never before seen the kinds of creatures that pressed into the transit car around her. They wore feathers or scales or fur of many colors. Some were bipedal. Others had multiple legs. Some had fangs, others claws. All carried conspicuous weaponry.

She moved closer to her new owner. He smiled down at her and drew her in front of him so he could reach around either side of her to the pole that kept them from toppling over when the car glided to its first stop.

Having him pressed up against her flank made her vastly uncomfortable.

The controller to her collar was so close now. She thought she could probably snatch it from his pocket and dive out of the rapidly closing doors—but that wouldn’t really gain her anything. She would still be collared. Someone bigger than her would take the controller away and then they’d own her. If she destroyed the controller or lost it somewhere, she’d still be collared and marked as a slave. Anyone could turn her in as a runaway and claim a reward. Either she’d be returned to Sloane or she’d be dragged back to the Viridians and forced back onto one of their ships to begin the process again.

She eyed the ray gun holstered near her right hand on the thigh of some kind of bipedal ogre. She could steal the gun and kill Sloane—or kill herself—but she couldn’t bring herself to take the easy escape. So she waited. Eventually they would get wherever they were headed and she’d get the collar off and then she would have more choices.

The shrouded creature who owned the electronics shop led them through towering stacks of small appliances into a back room. He dug through a teetering stack of tools before he found a palm-sized demagnetizer. He clipped it to the remote first, disrupting its signal, before he snapped a second one onto the collar at the nape of her neck.

Sloane stepped back out of the blast radius. Raena closed her eyes and flinched.

The proprietor tsked. He caught the collar as it fell from her neck.

“Excellent,” Sloane gushed. “Thank you.” He paid the man with a handful of circuitry.

Then he grabbed Raena’s arm and hauled her out of the shop. Dodging a fleet of two-wheeled scooters, he dragged her down the street.

“You’re welcome,” he said, grinning, as he hustled her along.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said quietly.

“You will.”

And she did. When she caught him spying on her that evening while she washed the Viridians’ choice of perfume from her hair, she throttled him with her towel and broke his neck. It didn’t kill him, but pushing him out the airlock finished the job.