Spy to Die For (Assassins Guild) (14 page)

Jack felt jittery. Some of it was the lack of sound in the shop, but most of it came from Skye’s determination to handle the entire ship purchase. She did it in a way that he never would have, fast without much negotiation.

In fact, most of the discussion she had with the wrinkled little man who ran the shop was about the type of ship, its specs and its registrations, not its pricing. She also asked some technical questions that Jack didn’t understand because he wasn’t a pilot.

He paced, looking at the images of the various ships, feeling out of his depth. He and Skye hadn’t discussed what was coming next, and that made him uncomfortable too. She hadn’t asked about the complexity of the automatic pilot. He started to, but she held up a hand, silencing him.

He let her. He was used to being with Rikki, who often took a commanding lead with things. But it made him even more uncomfortable.

Then Skye whipped out a payment chip, and walked to a payment kiosk with the little man. She didn’t consult Jack at all—and that was when he decided the ship was hers, no matter what she said. She would help him get out of this place, he’d figure out where to go and what to do next, and then she could have the damn ship back.

No matter what it did, how easy it was to fly, or whose name she registered it in.

That thought made him walk over to the kiosk. Skye glanced at him, as if he didn’t belong.

He had to ask the question without acting suspicious. “I was going to make sure you had all the information for the registration,” he said.

“I do, thanks,” she said as the little man added, “We always register in the name of the account where payment comes from.”

Jack held back an
oh
of surprise, but just barely. He hadn’t thought of that. Of course. Zaeen was in one of the most lawless sectors of the galaxy. No one wanted to admit who they were, no one wanted their account information on record anywhere, no one wanted to be traced. So businesses had to adapt.

It was like Krell times a million.

“All right then,” he said, feeling stupid and useless. He walked back to the front of the shop.

He hadn’t even seen what they purchased. What
she
purchased. He hoped it would work.

She came over to him and slipped her left hand through his arm. In her right hand, she held all kinds of chips and swipe meters.

“It’s going to take two hours to prepare the ship,” she said.

“I thought we were going to have one—”

“That’s fast,” she said softly. “They have to change parts of the registration, and I paid to have it fully stocked with food and water.”

He wanted to ask her if she trusted the little man to do that, but apparently she had.

Then she leaned her head against him, as if they were some kind of loving couple.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s get lunch.”

He had lost track. Was lunch the next meal? He had thought the next meal was dinner. He thought for a moment. It
was
dinner, but he didn’t correct her, because she might have been trying to conform to local time. Here, on Zaeen, it might actually be midday. There was no way to tell without linking up to the network or simply asking someone, neither of which he wanted to do.

She eased him out the door. The noise returned, not nearly as egregious as it had been. Voices, music, all of it had become a blur to him. He didn’t even try to pick out distinct sounds.

Instead of heading toward the overwhelming wall of noise, she turned away, going farther down the passageway.

The lack of people made him as uncomfortable as all of the people had in the center of the pavilion. He had to be honest with himself: he didn’t like it here. It was too big, too noisy, and too unfamiliar.

Usually he researched a place to death before arriving in it. He hadn’t researched anything before coming here. He was trusting Skye and trust did not come easy for him.

Small restaurants dotted the passageway, usually crammed up against the entrances to various ship shops. Most of the restaurants promised exotic meals, but one offered sandwiches. Skye was about to walk past it, when Jack pulled her toward it.

“Let’s just stop,” he said.

She glanced inside, then smiled at him. She agreed, apparently. She pushed the door open, and they stepped into the interior.

A waiting bot floated in front of them. Dozens of patrons sat inside, eating everything from sandwiches to tortillas to some kind of egg dish. Jack’s stomach growled. He wasn’t sure how long he had been hungry, but he remembered his stomach making the same protest shortly after they arrived on Zaeen.

The bot was trying to decide which face it should float in front of—his or Skye’s. It had apparently not been programmed for this kind of height disparity. It floated up to him, then down to her. As it hovered near her, she said, “Have you a private room?”

It showed her a menu with costs on it, suggesting a variety of private rooms—some large and a few very small.

She tapped the small one just as Jack was about to recommend the small one. He was thinking practically: he didn’t want to have any space for a sexual moment; he needed time to focus on the future, not on Skye’s lovely body. And she was too tempting for him to ignore in the right circumstance.

The bot threaded its way through the throng of patrons, and a narrow door opened. For a moment, Jack thought he might not be able to fit inside. Then he realized he could do so if he ducked and went in sideways.

Just when he was getting used to everything being at his height, the station threw something like this at him.

A table with two chairs pushed up against it filled most of the room. The walls were close. Jack wasn’t sure he could sit, but the table apparently read his size and adjusted slightly inward, so that there was room for him and the wall. He hoped there would be room for his knees as well.

Skye closed the door and took the far chair. As she sat, a see-through menu rose before her.

Jack sighed and went to his chair, expecting to hit his knees against the extra part of the table. But he didn’t. It was as if the entire table could mold itself to accommodate him without having to adjust its own mass. A menu rose in front of him as well, listing nearly six hundred items.

That overwhelmed him. He just pressed the word “sandwiches” and his choices narrowed by five hundred.

“I have a couple of questions for you,” he said to Skye.

She tapped something on the screen and her menu disappeared. Apparently she had ordered.

He tapped the first sandwich that had ingredients he recognized, then his menu disappeared as well.

Her gaze met his. “We’re lucky to get the ship in two hours,” she said, anticipating one of his questions.

“We’re getting it sight unseen,” Jack said. “Aren’t you worried about that?”

“Most places like this don’t allow you to test drive,” she said. “The theft rate would be too high. They don’t have a police force to go after everyone who blows out of the port in a stolen ship.”

Good point, and one he hadn’t thought of. He rarely dealt in thefts before the fact, and even then, not thefts as small as the theft of a ship. The thieves he had always vetted for the Rovers had been the guys with vision, the ones who stole millions or billions and destroyed lives. Jack had never even investigated someone who stole one or two things, even if those one or two things were ship-sized.

“What about the food?” he asked. “Do you trust that it’s not tainted?”

“Yes,” she said. “We can test when we get on board, but I think it’ll be fine. It won’t matter, though, if we aren’t planning to be on the ship long.”

He recognized the question in the form of a statement. What was happening next?

He wished he knew.

“We have choices,” he said. “You don’t have to travel with me if you don’t want to. Traveling with me has clearly proven itself unsafe.”

She smiled as if she’d thought of that. “How will you pilot your way back to the NetherRealm?”

“The ship should have an autopilot,” he said. “Right? And then you can give me an account so that I can pay you back.”

Her smile faded. “Is that what you want to do?”

“What I want and what’s best are two different things,” he said.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He wanted to find a room somewhere and spend the next week in it alone with her, having food delivered, and investigating all the things their bodies could do together. He wanted to turn back his entire relationship with the Rovers. He wanted to take back that last conversation he’d had with Heller.

He wanted a lot of things, but he couldn’t have them.

“I want things to be easier for both of us,” he said. “I’m getting in your way.”

She raised her eyebrows, then smiled. “I can’t deny that,” she said. “I accompanied you here. But I’m not on any schedule.”

“You’re working, right?” he asked. He still didn’t know a lot about her.

“Not here.” Her face clouded.

“So you need to get back,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “But I’ve finished most of my pressing work. I’m tracking something else entirely, and I’m not sure if it’s on a timeline.”

He waited. He didn’t want to ask her what that something was. He didn’t want to pry.

Then she shrugged. “Let’s figure out what you need first. I understand if you want to stay here.”

“I
definitely
do not what to stay here,” he said so quickly that he surprised himself. Zaeen was too crowded, too uncomfortable, too strange for him. And he thought he could get along anywhere.

“You go back to the NetherRealm and you have to contend with the Rovers,” she said.

He nodded.

“Have you thought of what you’d do?” she asked.

“Maybe I should hire someone from the Assassins Guild to take out Heller,” Jack said. He was mostly joking, but the joke didn’t feel funny to him.

“Well, that would bring everything full circle,” she said.

His breath caught. He looked up at her.

“It would?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Remember that woman I saw Heller with?”

He let out a small breath. He had forgotten all about her. “The assassin from the Guild. Hiring a Rover.”

“Yeah,” Skye said. “It bothers me, and not just for the obvious reason.”

“Looks like we have time,” Jack said. “Tell me what this is all about.”

Their drinks rose out of a side pocket of the table, startling Skye. She glanced around the room, wishing she had a more sophisticated way to check for surveillance equipment. She would have to assume that their conversation was being recorded, but she would also have to assume that no one would care about it, that every conversation was recorded here on Zaeen. With that much information being stored somewhere, only bots could search through it, and if she avoided trigger words, then no one would ever hear this conversation.

Of course, she had no idea what the trigger words were, so she could only hope she would avoid them.

Jack grabbed the cups and handed her hers. He sipped his. He looked a bit nervous, as if something she had said unnerved him.

Although he’d been nervous since they arrived. Even before he loudly stated that he didn’t want to stay here, she had the sense that he hated Zaeen.

She didn’t feel much better about it.

“This morning,” she said, then paused. “I think it was
this
morning. All of the travel has my time sense confused.”

“Our morning,” he said.

“When I saw one of the most proficient members of the Guild talking to Heller, I started worrying. She had to have a reason to hire someone like him.” She decided to skip the word “assassin,” figuring that might trigger something. She hoped Jack would be as cautious.

“Someone proficient?” he asked, and it took her a moment to understand. He had clearly taken her cue and was also avoiding trigger words. He sipped his beverage again. He seemed to have relaxed since she started into this.

She took a sip of her beverage too. She’d only asked for lemon-flavored water, and that was what she got. She was thirsty, and she hadn’t even realized it until now.

At some point, both of them would have to stop and actually sleep. Not do anything else. Just sleep.

But the idea of being in a bed with Jack made her cheeks warm. She wondered if he could sense what she was thinking about. Probably not, since he seemed preoccupied with what she had just told him.

“She’s one of the best,” Skye said. “And here’s the thing. She said that he was the third in line. She said there was a chance that they wouldn’t need him, but they were reserving his time.”

“For what?” Jack asked.

Skye shrugged. “She was going to send the information to an account, along with payment. She wasn’t just reserving him. She was reserving a team.”

“Oh, God,” Jack said. He seemed to understand what that meant. “This may be tied to something I know, but we can’t discuss it here.”

Then he glanced around, somewhat pointedly. She got the message, even if she hadn’t had it before.

“However, I can ask a few questions,” he said. “Is this woman someone you’re investigating?”

“No,” Skye said. “But there’ve been some unusual things coming out of the Guild, and they don’t entirely make sense. I’m worried, and that’s what I was going to investigate.”

“Worried how?” Jack asked.

“The Guild’s all about rules and regulations. I think there’s a rogue element, not following those regulations.”

“You want to stop that?” Jack asked.

She smiled. She had told him enough to make that question relevant.

Then food popped up from that same part of the table. Her sandwich stood six inches high and had more food stacked around it. It smelled of ham and cheese and fresh bread.

Jack’s was identical, except that it had chicken and different vegetables. Otherwise, there was the same kind of bread and just as much unnecessary food.

“We could have split something,” Skye said.

“And still had enough to feed an army,” Jack said. But he reached over, grabbed his plate, and slid it to him. As he did, silverware and napkins popped up near him.

She grabbed her own food and slid it toward her. After just a few hours, Jack was clearly beginning to figure her out.

That should bother her more than it did.

“Initially, I started tracking this rogue group because I thought maybe I should join them,” she said. “I was looking at a variety of possibilities. I figured that if I could find someone else who broke the rules, I might get permission to break more of them. Then I realized that it was more pervasive than that, so I thought I could use these people as an excuse to get me out of the Guild.”

Jack hadn’t picked up his sandwich yet. He was watching her intently. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the subject of such regard from someone.

She picked up a baby carrot, which looked fresher than any she’d seen in a while.

“The more I investigated, the more furtive it all seemed,” she said. “And not in a good way. These people were up to something, but what, I couldn’t tell. It bothered me. After all, my job is to investigate things, and I started investigating my own people, and I found things that disturbed me.”

“But things you could use if you wanted to,” Jack said.

She shook her head. “It was more than that,” she said. “It was… scary, on some level. I only got bits and pieces, but what I got didn’t seem right.”

“Right for what?” he asked.

“Right for… decency?” Her voice went up at the end. She wasn’t even sure herself. She had hated the Guild for so long that she knew her feelings about the Guild weren’t always a great guide.

“You found it hard to believe that the Guild broke the rules?” he asked, sounding like he didn’t find it hard at all.

“It wasn’t that the Guild broke the rules,” she said, “although that was part of it. No one trained by the Guild broke the Guild’s rules, not without punishment.”

“Provided they got caught,” Jack said.

She switched the carrot to the other hand. “Yeah. And I haven’t reported them yet, because I want to know what they’re up to. But each time I find something, I discover something else.”

Jack wrapped his long fingers around his sandwich. Skye realized that one of the reasons she hadn’t picked up hers was because it was so thick. She set the carrot down and grabbed her knife and fork instead.

“Heller,” Jack said, “and his people only do one kind of job.”

She so appreciated Jack’s caution. She understood what he meant. Heller and the Rovers were assassins, nothing else.

“I know,” she said.

“So why would someone from the Guild need Heller and what does it mean, as a backup?” Jack took a bite of the sandwich. Parts fell all over the plate. That didn’t seem to bother him.

“I have a theory.” She pressed down on the bread. The interior of the sandwich squished out. He was making a mess. It didn’t matter if she did.

But she wouldn’t be able to talk and eat at the same time.

“One of the Guild’s directors got murdered a while ago,” Skye said. “Someone in-house did it, and everyone said that person was crazy. But what if that’s not true? What if it was supposed to happen? I mean, everyone in the Guild must submit to constant medical testing, both physical and psychological. I can’t imagine how someone’s craziness got through the tests.”

“Yet all this behind-the-scenes suspicious stuff is going on,” Jack said.

“But that’s not crazy,” Skye said. “I’m not sure it would come out in tests.”

Jack nodded. “Have you investigated the director’s death?”

“It happened before I was one of the investigators for the Guild,” Skye said. “There’s some kind of rift, and it’s been around for a while. I just keep thinking that the only reason to hire an outside killer—”

“Is to hide the Guild conspiracy,” Jack said.

She shuddered. She hadn’t really thought about that word until now.
Conspiracy
. It was such a nasty term.

“But why?” she asked. “I mean, if you don’t like the Guild, leave after your time period is up. Start a new organization or join Heller’s organization. Or start your own company. There’s no reason to destroy the Guild.”

“Unless you hate it,” Jack said.

He spoke quietly, calmly, as if hating the Guild were the most normal thing in the universe.

She felt cold. She hated the Guild, but she would never destroy it. And maybe hate was too strong a word. She hated parts of the Guild, the parts that trapped her, the parts that assumed she could be a killer. The parts that seemed arbitrary.

But she appreciated parts of it too. She respected a lot of her teachers—not the ones who taught assassination, but the ones who taught history and languages and survival skills. She loved the buildings and the gardens. She liked a lot of the people she had grown up with.

She wouldn’t purposefully harm any of them.

But maybe that was because she wasn’t an assassin. Maybe someone with assassin training and the same hatred for parts of the Guild would try to destroy it.

“I don’t want to be the one to save the Guild,” she said.

“Then ignore all of this,” Jack said.

She shook her head. “That’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t.”