Replicant: The Kithran Regenesis, Book 2 (7 page)

I brushed his hand off and stood, biting back a groan at my sore muscles. “I’m not the right female for the job you have in mind.”

He didn’t say anything, just watched me as I left. I held my breath until I was two tunnels away before the lack of air sent the world spinning. I sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall. Once I’d dreamed of a family. I’d grown up in a big one. I’d had only two sisters, but there’d been fourteen cousins. Family gatherings had been noisy and so damned fun. My parents had just married a fourth Gwinarian when this world was crushed. Lanna. I could still picture her, still remember how new their relationship had been. My sisters and I, grown at that point, had moved out to give our parents space. We’d just set up our own pod, and Gwinlan—

Ice froze my veins.

I hadn’t thought either of my sisters’ names in so long, the sudden pain slashed through me like foot-long claws raking my body. Moaning, I dropped fully to the floor, curling up to try and hold in the cries that built in my chest. Wave after wave of agony washed over me, polluting my lungs, turning the world around me black and tight as if the walls were moving in, crushing me. I clawed at my throat, feeling skin give beneath my nails, the physical pain shocking me into the realization that I had to get somewhere private. I tried to stand and couldn’t get my legs to work. Sobs wracked my chest and I crawled, part of my mind desperately hoping no one came along.

Arms came around me. “Hey, shh, it’s going to be okay, Jarana. Try to breathe.”

“No,” I moaned, trying to crawl faster, trying to dislodge them. I thought it was Kei, that he’d followed me. Kei, who thought I could have children, a medic who couldn’t see past the apparently healthy body to the living nightmare inside me. Children? What a joke. No child deserved a mother like me. One who had slit a man’s throat and watched his blood pool into the floor of his own spaceship, one who had turned an entire ship of people over to the worst prison in the galaxies, knowing some could have been innocent.

I blindly struck out, my fist connecting to someone’s flesh with a loud smack. The arms disappeared. Stronger ones replaced them.

“Hell, run and get Kei so he can knock her out!”

Part of me heard Lux, but my mind was bombarded with memories of Gwinlan and Selena, my sisters, and Lanna, Borkan, Galan…and Naanlee, oh gods, my Naanlee…my mother. Peeling hands off me, I snarled and pulled away, curling back up and pressing my palms to my head to hold in the screams. “All dead. All dead. All dead.” The words escaped my mouth no matter how hard I tried to hold them in.

Loud footsteps pounded and stopped beside me. I rolled onto my stomach and started crawling again. I had to get home. I remembered I didn’t have a home just as something touched my neck. I heard a whooshing sound and then nothing at all.

Someone was stroking my hair. I didn’t make a sound, didn’t twitch, and didn’t do anything to let the person know I was awake.

“She never dealt with it. No wonder.”

Recognizing Egan’s voice, I held still because I couldn’t remember how I got here. There was a knot of panic or, no, something else in my chest. I didn’t recognize it—it felt hard and so painful, it captured most of my attention. There was enough left to let me know it wasn’t Egan touching me. His voice was too far away.

“Gods, my heart hurts so much right now. Shit.”

That was Lux. Foul-mouthed as always. In college, I’d put my mouth on those luscious lips of hers to shut her up. She had an overbite that made her self-conscious. She didn’t think anyone realized it did, but I’d seen it right off and had been shocked because all that lush upper lip made me think about was sex.

Lux wasn’t the one stroking my hair either because her voice sounded like it came from the same place Egan’s had. My forehead wrinkled with the frown I couldn’t hold back. I didn’t want Kei touching me.

Kei, who talked of Gwinarian children, who’d looked at me like I could provide them.

“She’s waking.”

That voice, close enough to send breath over my cheek, forced my eyes open because it wasn’t Kei. My gaze locked with Maska’s.
He
was stroking my hair? Compassion softened his beautiful, masculine features. Compassion I didn’t deserve. I pulled back and his hand dropped, his expression going closed in a heartbeat.

Something beeped by my head, and I looked at the wireless monitor that ran my vitals continuously. I was in the med pod. Sudden humiliation swamped me when I remembered the very public breakdown. Groaning softly, I shut my eyes. “You can all go away now. The crazy woman is under control.”

“Shut up, Jarana,” Lux snapped. “Crazy is the last thing you are. Hell, woman, did you ever deal with what happened?”

“That’s none of your business.”

I heard rustling, and in the next instant, she was leaning over the bed, touching my face. “Look at me.”

A tiny smile wormed its way past the humiliation. “You know better than to order me around.” But I opened my eyes again. She had a purple bruise blossoming on her cheek. Her eyes were filled with the kind of consideration I did
not
want to see right now. Everything in me felt shaky and brittle…like I could shatter with the slightest nudge. “How many?”

She frowned. “How many what?”

“How many saw that?”

Lux sucked in that full upper lip and bit it.

“I don’t want to know, do I?”

“You were right outside the control room.” She met my gaze straight on.

“Fuck.”

She grinned, her lip popping back out. “Yeah.”

She was strong, independent. She knew what this sort of public display would be like for me, and I could see the understanding in her expression. “Who carried me here?”

Lux nodded toward the corner of the room. I turned and felt all heat drain from my face when I saw Erik. He watched me with an expression I couldn’t read from the shadows. That strange connection snapped between us again. Something about his body language hit me, and I glanced at Maska to find him looking from Erik to me. A faint hint of sadness crept over his features before he quickly looked down and let his hair slide around his face.

Gods, Maska is an empath.

He could sense emotion, feed emotion back to people. A few Replicants carried that extra sensitivity, and so far, all the ones I’d encountered used the ability to manipulate people into doing what they wanted. I stared at the Replicant. Was he trying to make me feel sorry for him?

Meeting his gaze, I tried to read him, but it was hard with those nearly solid, opaque eyes.

“You haven’t been eating well,” Kei said, stepping into my line of sight next to Maska. “Your body is nearly starved of nutrients, so I’m putting you on a strict diet. And maybe you should lay off the whiskey until you build your system back up.”

Like that will happen.

“Seriously, Jarana, you’re in rough shape.” Kei turned the monitor my way and pointed.

I ignored the squiggly lines that showed what vitamins and nutrients my body was missing and instead looked around the room. I didn’t know what to say to these people. Couldn’t find words to explain what happened because I couldn’t understand it completely myself. On some level, I knew that the years of bottled grief had spilled over, but even trying to come up with an explanation hurt too much. I felt inside out, raw and liable to lose it again at any second.

“You should talk to someone, Jarana,” Lux said quietly.

I sat up, glaring at Kei when he stepped in front of Maska and tried to push me back down. “Want to keep those fingers intact?” I lifted an eyebrow.

“We don’t have any psychologists on planet, but you could talk to some of the other Gwinarians. You could talk to Egan.” Lux threaded her fingers with Egan’s, looking up at him. “He…well, I’ll let him tell you, but he went through something awful here.”

“I don’t need to talk to anyone. It was nothing but exhaustion. A little rest and I’ll be good as new.” I noted the monitor picked up my faster heartbeat. If I wasn’t careful, my agitation would be on display for the full room.

“It is necessary.” She wrinkled her nose. “But maybe after a shower, huh? Did you really work out in the microsuit?”

“Nothing like telling a woman she stinks to bring her back to reality.” I swung my legs to the side of the bed but didn’t try to stand yet because my limbs felt kind of loose and a little numb.

Erik stood. “I’ll take you to your pod.”

Scowling, I clenched my hands into fists. “I don’t need help. I can walk.”

“You don’t smell bad,” Maska murmured. “Lux is being a bitch. It’s her thing.”

It was. I knew that. I also knew she said it to put a little normalcy into this tense situation. I opened my mouth to tell them I planned to shower and take Maska off planet, but something held my tongue. At this moment, I didn’t plan to take him anywhere.

Shock rumbled around in my brain before bowing to the return of exhaustion and humiliation. When Erik came close, I looked up into his blue eyes before closing my own. “I appreciate the help. Thank you.”

“Killed you to say that, didn’t it?” he muttered. A faint thread of amusement laced his tone. He held out one big hand.

I let him pull me to my feet, accepted the arm around my shoulders and gave each person in the room a quick glance. “I’m sorry for the disruption.” My look stopped on Kei, and it was hard to meet his gaze because, again, all I could think about was his talk of children. “Thanks for knocking me out.”

“No problem.”

My legs wobbled with the first step, and Erik pulled me closer as he walked me into the tunnel. I glanced up and caught Maska looking at us through the window. Pain poured off the man in waves, and I wanted to tell him he had nothing to worry about. Though Erik’s warmth and strength were welcome…though he smelled so good he made my mouth water, I had no intention of doing anything with the man. I didn’t want to do any more damage to any of these people.

I was going to sleep a couple of days, then give Lux the wires to her ship so she could take me out of here. No one knew I’d found one of the last escaped Replicants, and as long as he changed back into his feminine form, it would stay secret forever.

I just wanted away from here.

Unfortunately, once Erik dropped me off at my living pod, I found I no longer had a choice. My VR screen showed a message, and only one place had my number. Seems Lux’s search on the NED had alerted the wrong people, who in turn had dug until they came upon Kei’s vidscreen calls to Replicant medics. They knew I had one of the escaped Replicants and were demanding to know why he hadn’t been brought in.

Chapter Eight

I gave the administrators on Bastilleen some bullshit about problems with the ship. Though, technically, it wasn’t a lie. I’m not sure what prompted my actions, but after my shower, I crawled into that big bed and slept like the dead. When I woke, it was to alarms.

Recognizing the signal for an incoming windstorm, I raced to the panel by the front door and programmed the dome to close. I watched the little leeto outside scramble toward a hole in the tree and hoped he’d make it through. Some of the fierce storms took out even the giant, ancient trees that had withstood the explosions.

The wind hit as the dome cover closed, and I programmed low lights. The tall pods were built to sway with the winds so they didn’t snap. The interlocking tunnels had been designed by the most brilliant Gwinarian engineers, and each one sat at angles that helped support the pods while still allowing the bit of sway needed to fight the winds.

They roared outside now, ripping off leaves and small limbs that I could hear crashing into the dome. I thought about sneaking into the social pod for more booze, but didn’t have the energy. Instead, I looked in the fully stocked cooling unit built into the wall of the kitchen.

This was the room I’d avoided the most. Growing up, our family had spent most of our time in the eating area of our kitchen, sprawled on the massive cushions, sharing food or playing games. Our cushions had been a crazy pile of jewel tones because Galan, one of my fathers, had loved the brightest, most gaudy colors he could find. Naanlee and Borkan both preferred more subtle blues and greens, but they’d been unable to resist anything Galan wanted.

Neither could I nor my sisters. Galan had been a bright, beautiful ray of sunshine who thought nothing of sweeping up one of us in his brawny arms and dancing us down a public tunnel. He’d worn small braids in his long hair, and every morning I’d crawled into his lap on those bright cushions and asked him to put braids in my hair.

Realizing I was staring at the cushions with the cooling unit open, I reached inside and blindly grabbed whatever was on the top shelf. Leafy blues, just like Earth’s leafy greens. These tasted better cooked in some kind of sauce, but I didn’t want to stay in the kitchen. Crunching on the raw vegetables, I wandered back into the main room and suddenly missed my ship. I had vids and music on it. Not much—I’d been too busy to collect personal things for the most part, but I had a few things to keep my mind occupied. I paced the room, but with the dome cover on and nothing of my own inside, it was the same as walking around a rental room. Maybe more luxurious, but nothing here was mine.

In the corner, I spotted a notch on the wall and pressed it to discover it opened into a small workout room I hadn’t realized was even there. It had an air tread, the VR weight system, and one wall was a floor to ceiling mirror. Borkan, my other father, had set up one just like this in our home because Naanlee preferred working out in private. Or so he said. My sisters and I had figured out pretty young that all three of our parents liked working out in private. Especially after Galan had wedged a big, fluffy couch in the corner of the room.