Fair warning, though. She couldn’t do anything without fair warning.
Another side of herself that she wasn’t all that fond of.
“I forgot to keep the samples,” she said. “Had I known they would have been useful, I would have kept some.”
He smiled just a little, and damn him, the smile was warm. “You could have asked and I would have assisted you in the collection. You didn’t have to swipe some off me during that dance.”
So he figured that much out, after her little hint.
“I didn’t want to romp in your room,” she said. “I was done with games. I wanted to know who you were.”
“I told you—”
“You didn’t tell me a goddamn thing.” She couldn’t keep her voice down any longer. “You said your name was Misha, but that didn’t mean anything to me.”
He winced. Was that a wince? Really? What was he playing at? He had no right to wince, not after what he had done to her.
“You didn’t tell me your name was Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski,” she said. “The man who murdered my father.”
“What?” he said. And he looked surprised. Surprised. What gave him the right to look surprised? Or to wince. He had no right to any emotions in this. He had used her, and he didn’t get to play act anymore.
“Now do you understand why I want you to stay the hell away from me?” she asked, more loudly than she had intended.
“Actually, no,” he said. “I would have thought that you would remember me fondly. After all, I—”
“You
murdered
my father. You and your mother. I was in the hospital for weeks after that.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “And—”
She let out a cry, part of her amazed at her own reaction. It was as if that part of her had separated out, and was watching from above. She lunged at him. He put up his hand as if to stop her, and she grabbed it with her right hand, pressing that finger into the flesh of his wrist, right over a vein.
“You think that murdering my father is something I should be grateful for?” she asked when she could finally manage words.
“Um, I didn’t kill him, my mother did, and yes, I think…” he blinked at her, his pupils growing wide. “I think…”
He tilted his head again, then licked his lips. The narcotic created dry mouth. That was the only sign it had been used.
“Whatthehelldidyoudo?”
He mushed all the words together. His mouth clearly wasn’t working properly anymore.
He had only a few seconds of consciousness yet.
“Nothing you won’t recover from,” she said, “which is more than we can say about me. What you did to me is unspeakable, Mikael.”
She was proud of herself for getting his name right. He blinked. He wasn’t unconscious yet.
He shook his head just a little. Then his eyes closed and he slumped against the wall.
She grabbed him around the waist and pulled him toward her. That body of his, even heavy, even deadweight, felt great through his clothes. She still liked the feel of him after everything.
Better to avoid him altogether. Better to stay away. He had some kind of hold on her that she didn’t entirely understand.
She half-carried him the few steps across the corridor to her door. Then she used her palm to slap the door open. She brought him inside, and closed the door.
The security camera would see it all, of course, but wouldn’t know what happened. They had a conversation, they touched, and then she grabbed him and dragged him into the room. That was all the camera would see.
That was all it needed to see—at least for the next hour or two.
And by then, she would be gone.
The bed smelled of Rikki. Misha turned his head slightly and inhaled deeply from the pillow. Amazing that he could recognize the scent of her after such a short acquaintance. Such a short,
amazing
acquaintance. Such a short, amazing,
arousing
acquaintance.
He stretched—and hit his feet on something. That caught his attention. His bed didn’t have a frame or anything near the feet. He sat up slightly and nearly hit his head on a shelf beside the bed.
Not his room.
Not a room he’d ever seen before.
A utilitarian, small room. An uncomfortable room. A room filled with people.
He frowned and realized he was a bit woozy. A woman peered over him and it wasn’t Rikki. It took Misha a minute to realize that the woman was that security officer—what was her name? Windham. That was it.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Orlinski,” she said.
“What?” he said. Or rather, he croaked. The word came out as “waaa?” with no strong consonants.
He was woozy, he could barely talk, his mouth tasted of sweaty feet, and he felt weak.
She had drugged him.
Not this stupid Windham woman, but Rikki. Damn it. When she grabbed him.
He remembered now: that slight needle-like pain on his wrist, the way the corridor had gone all colors, like a bad light show in a bar, her face leaning over his, telling him something important—
“We’re not sure what she gave you, Mr. Orlinski, so we can’t give you an antidote. But we have some general scrubbers in the security office that should work for standard sleeping drugs and for alcohol. Let me help you sit up.”
She was still leaning over him, and the idea of her trying to fit into the small space that this bed occupied—a space that made him uncomfortable with her—had him waving his hands to keep her back.
“You’re going to have to come with us, Mr. Orlinski,” the security woman, Windham, said. “We need to find out a few things.”
He managed to scoot up in the bed, looked down, saw that she had left him clothed—and by
she
, he meant Rikki. He didn’t want to think of the security woman as a “she” in the Rikki-sense, which meant in the sexual sense, which really meant in the desirable sense, which also meant in the infuriating sense—
And what had she given him? Whatever it was, it was still in his system.
He patted his pockets and heard sounds above him. He looked up to see the men behind Windham (How had they all fit into this tiny room?) holding weapons on him.
He pulled out an all-purpose scrubber which he trusted a lot more than their scrubber. Besides, based on the taste still lingering unpleasantly in his mouth, he had a hunch he knew what kind of narcotic Rikki had used on him.
He held out one hand, showed the scrubber with the other, and sprayed the damn stuff up his nose. Then, for good measure, he dry-swallowed a small pill that he kept in the scrubber bottle.
Then he blinked and felt his head clear. A little, anyway. Not entirely, but enough to formulate questions. Or at least, near-questions, with actual consonants.
“Rikki?”
The Windham woman looked confused. And because his head wasn’t entirely clear, it took him a second to understand why she was confused.
“Rachel?” he said firmly as if the first time he had just mangled Rikki’s name.
“Gone,” the woman said.
“Gone?” he asked, trying to comprehend that. How did a passenger get gone from an interstellar cruise liner. He pushed his fuzzy brain. “Did we stop somewhere?”
“No,” the woman said. “She stole an emergency lifeship. At least, there’s one missing and she doesn’t show up on any of our in-house sensors.”
The woman was slapping an identi-card against her hand.
Misha nodded toward it. “Ri—Rachel’s?”
“Yes.” That was an admission of defeat. If she had been wearing an identi-chip like he had, the security people could have tracked her better. But the cards—designed to get more money out of the poorer passengers—only tracked someone when she carried it. “And someone tampered with the security cameras near a lifeship pod not far from here. The ship’s been gone for hours.”
Meaning they couldn’t easily track it and they certainly couldn’t turn this behemoth ship around to catch her. This ship had to keep going to its destination and trust local authorities to find Rikki.
Only, if she had escaped in the NetherRealm, there was no one authority, and no one to contact.
Despite himself, he felt admiration for her. She was right: she didn’t need his training. He would never have tried something so daring on his own. The Guild frowned on theft in the commission of a job, even if that theft wouldn’t have had many consequences, because the theft added something illegal to something legal.
And there weren’t a lot of consequences if she vanished into the NetherRealm. Even the stolen lifeship wasn’t that serious. Interstellar cruisers had learned through their own disasters to have twice the number of emergency lifeships on board than they needed, ostensibly because one part of the ship might be impossible to reach. But in reality, they wanted to show that they had no liability should something go horribly, awfully wrong.
He swung his legs off the side of the bed, not caring that he nearly kicked the security woman, or that his movement had forced a third guard (whom he hadn’t noticed until now) back into the corridor. Misha wasn’t quite willing to think of Rikki being missing yet. She had said something to him, and he needed to remember what that was.
“If she’s gone, and she clearly drugged me, then what are you doing here?” he asked. “I think this would count as a personal matter.”
“It would, Mr. Orlinski, if not for one
little
thing.” The Windham woman’s emphasis on the word “little” didn’t make the little thing sound so very little.
She had his attention whether he wanted to give it to her or not.
“And what would that be?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, her gaze steely, “I thought I’d better ask the only assassin we had on board if he had ever heard of someone named Elio Testrial.”
Misha resisted the urge to close his eyes in disgust. Damn that Rikki. She had pulled it off again. She had gotten Misha blamed for her work—and not in a good way.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard of Elio Testrial. I suppose you’re going to want to discuss this in the security office.”
The Windham woman smiled for the first time since he met her. It was not a pleasant smile.
“Now you’re catching on, Mr. Orlinski. We’d like you to come with us.”
It took most of a week for Rikki to make her way to Krell, a grimy little space station at the end of nowhere. First she had to get off the interstellar cruise ship, which proved easier than expected. The emergency lifeship she had scouted had enough provisions to get her to Centaar, a small planet at the edge of the NetherRealm.
She docked in low orbit around Centaar on a docking ring known for theft and graft. She was giving them a gift: they could dismantle the lifeship for parts, so long as the folks running the ring brought her down to Oyal, a city on the surface. And they did.
Rikki hadn’t been to Oyal before, but she had heard about it, and the place was as corrupt as she expected. The rich were very rich here, and lived in a protected dome outside the city—not because the atmosphere was tough for humans to breathe, but because a dome was difficult for armed gangs to easily breach.
She carried enough cash on her to pay off muggers, and searched for a place that would rent a ship, no questions asked. Most places had a few questions or wanted a huge financial guarantee that she would bring the ship back.
She knew she’d never get her guarantee back, so she wanted to pay the smallest guarantee possible. She found a ship-rental place on a back alley in Oyal that made her skin crawl.
But the place let her inspect the ship, and while its interior was shoddy, its equipment was in top shape. Still, the interior would have made Rikki hate the ship, except for one thing: She knew she was heading to Krell. She needed a clean and relatively safe place to sleep while she was there.
Krell was a short distance back the way she had come from, in the NetherRealm, a place for people who didn’t want to be noticed. Krell didn’t ID anyone or question them or even track its arrivals and departures. Security was nonexistent, theft was rampant, and cleanliness—well, that had gone out the window as well.
It hadn’t been her idea to come to Krell. She had set up a meeting with an old friend, and he had chosen the venue.
The fact that the venue was Krell either meant he was afraid of something or he had done something particularly horrible. And knowing Jack Hunter, it was probably both.
Rikki had met Jack in that fateful year after her father died. Jack was the long-term survivor of government child care. Jack pretended nothing mattered, but he had protected her, even though he was a scrawny kid, one year younger and not even close to his adult growth.
In fact, she still saw him that way, even though he wasn’t scrawny anymore, and his adult growth had made him into one of those men who was too big for comfortable space travel.
Jack was six foot six, a bear of a man. He was trim for his size, but out here, in the realm of space stations and starships, his height made him a giant.