“I don’t understand the confusion though,” Jon said. “I think that’s important.”
“Why?” Tristan asked.
“What did you tell her that would cause confusion?” Jon asked.
Tristan and Gray thought about that. “Nothing that I can think of,” Tristan said finally.
“So then, why was she confused?”
“I don’t know,” Tristan said after thinking about it for a few moments. “Do you know why?”
“No,” Jon replied. “I wish I did.”
***
An hour later Faith was tired from her frantic pacing, but no more relaxed. She put Bubbles down on her favorite pillow, careful not to wake her. Then she went into the bathroom and turned on the taps in the shower. She began to undress, averting her eyes from the mirror, then stilled. She argued with herself for a moment, then made up her mind and turned to face the mirror. She stared at her reflection as she methodically listed all the reasons why she could never,
ever
be the Falcoran’s Arima, even if they could claim her. It was a painful process, but, she told herself, a necessary one. A few minutes later she turned her back on the mirror, undressed, and stepped into the shower. She stayed there until her tears stopped. After her shower she threw on her pajamas and climbed into bed, too tired to take the time to dry her hair.
“Have you lost your mind, Cinthy?” a male voice shouted angrily. “You’ll get us all killed if you use that thing.”
“Don’t worry, Rick, I won’t point in your direction,” Cinthy said snidely.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Rick retorted. “The penalty for using a gamma rifle on Earth is death. Just having the damn thing can get you locked up for several decades. They’re dangerous as hell.”
“That’s the point,” Cinthy replied. “These people need to know we mean business. If they don’t make this trade, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Faith opened her eyes slowly, her entire body screaming with pain. It took her a few moments to realize that she was hanging by the wrists from a very high ceiling. She looked around slowly, careful to prevent her body from moving any more than necessary. There were a dozen huge, shiny metal vats set in a row down the center of a long, narrow building. The wall on the opposite side of the vats held several big bay doors. One of the doors was rolled partly open, revealing a narrow swath of darkness beyond.
A maze of shiny duct pipe hung from the ceiling, blocking much of Faith’s view. She was able to see the three, nauseatingly familiar ex-guards crouched down behind the vats that stood between where she hung, and the open door. She couldn’t see Cinthy, but she had no trouble hearing her. She ignored the pain that wracked her body, and focused on what they were saying.
“How much longer?” Cinthy asked, her voice coming from a vat a little further down.
“Ten minutes,” one of the men replied. “Should I get her down?”
“No,” Cinthy said. “Let her hang there. Once they deliver Eric, we’ll get gone while they waste time with her. She’s a good diversion.”
“They are not going to give us Eric unless we hand her over,” a different man said. Rick again, Faith thought, recognizing the voice.
“They will if they don’t want me to kill her,” Cinthy said.
“If you do that, they’ll kill Eric,” Rick said.
Silence.
“We aren’t dealing with local cops,” Rick continued. “This is the Directorate, Cinthy. They
will
kill him, make no mistake about that, and it won’t be pretty.”
“If we trade, they’ll have no reason not to blow us to hell,” Cinthy said after another long silence. “This is the only way to be sure that they let us leave with Eric. We’re playing this my way.”
“First you bring a gamma rifle, and now you expect the Directorate to hand Eric over without keeping up your end of the deal,” Rick said. “This is not going to work, Cinthy, and you’re a fool for thinking it will. Personally, I’m not ready to die.” Faith saw Rick stand up, felt bile rise in her throat at the sight of him.
“Get down, fool,” Cinthy ordered angrily.
“I’m out of here,” he said to Cinthy. He turned around and met Faith’s gaze with a mocking grin, raised one palm to his mouth and blew her a kiss. A second later, his head simply ceased to exist, a fact that Faith had no time to register before her world became one of fire and pain. Mind bending, soul searing pain that left her wishing for only one thing. To die.
“This is worse than the screams,” Tristan said tightly as his brothers joined him outside Faith’s door. They gritted their teeth as they listened helplessly to Faith’s heartbreaking sobs. Sobs that were not loud enough to have awakened them as the screams always did. This time, it was Faith’s emotional pain that had awakened them.
“We need to push her into a deep sleep before we go into a blood rage,” Tristan said.
“We can’t,” Jon said. “She’s not sleeping.”
Tristan and Gray didn’t doubt their brother, but they reached for Faith anyway to confirm that she was awake. “What do we do?” Gray asked.
Instead of answering, Tristan stepped forward and knocked on Faith’s door. The sobs continued. “Faith,” he called. “Please let us in.”
The sobs stopped for a moment, as though Faith were holding her breath. When they resumed they were softer, and getting closer. Faith was approaching the door. Tristan waited tensely, hoping with all of his might that she would open the door, and invite them in.
They listened to the lock slide free, the door knob turn, the door open, and there she was, her face tear streaked and pale, her eyes red, the expression on her face one of such hopelessness that it hurt their hearts to see it. They all felt Faith’s desperate need to be comforted, and they stilled, waiting to see what she would do. Would she invite them in? Send them away? Or would she give in to the urge to throw herself into Tristan’s arms once again as they sensed she both needed, and wanted, desperately to do. The moment stretched out, then hung there, frozen between them.
“Come in,” she said finally, the tears still flowing though the sobs were fading to hiccups.
Tristan stepped inside, Gray and Jon at his heels. “Go ahead and have a seat,” Faith said. “I’ll be right back.”
They watched Faith go into the bathroom and close the door, then they looked at each other for a moment before taking seats at the table in the sitting area of her room. As soon as they sat down Bubbles leapt onto Tristan’s shoulder. She was highly distressed, her little popping sounds conveying an almost frantic worry.
“It’s all right Bubbles,” Tristan said as he petted her soothingly. “We’re going to help, right now.”
Bubbles started to relax, then the bathroom door opened and she scrunched herself up and shot across the room to land on Faith’s shoulder. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Faith said. “I’m fine.”
Bubbles looked at Tristan, then back to Faith, obviously not buying Faith’s statement for a moment. Tristan didn’t want to give her the chance to tell them the same thing.
“Faith,” he said as she was starting to open her mouth. “We have a confession to make.”
That stopped her. “Confession?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tristan said, gesturing to the empty chair. Faith hesitated, then sat down.
“From the first night that you came aboard the cutter you have had nightmares during which you scream,” Tristan said.
“Every night?” Faith asked, surprised.
“Every single night,” Tristan replied. “On the first night, as we told you, we didn’t know what was happening and entered your room. Since then, we have not entered your room, but we have stood outside your door, unable to do anything to help you other than use our Water magic to send you into a deeper sleep where the nightmares cannot reach you. We were afraid you would tell us not to do it, and we couldn’t bear that, so we kept it from you. I cannot honestly say that we are sorry for taking you from the nightmares. But we are sorry for not telling you, as we should have.”
“I can’t very well be angry with you for helping me,” she said. “I’m sorry though, that I’ve disturbed your sleep every night.”
“You needn’t apologize for something you cannot help,” Tristan said. “Tonight you didn’t scream. It was your crying that brought us to your door. We promised ourselves that we would not ask you this, but I find that I cannot help myself. Why do you have such nightmares, Faith?”
Faith trusted the Falcorans. If it was because she was supposed to be their Arima, she no longer cared. She hadn’t truly trusted anyone since Grace died, and she’d missed it. More than that, she
needed
it. And the Falcorans were
safe
. They could never claim her, never ask for something she couldn’t give them. Before giving herself a chance to rethink her decision, she began talking.
“A couple of years ago I interned part time at a museum as an art history student,” she said, surprising the Falcorans, though she didn’t notice. “I made friends with a woman who worked there full time, Cinthy Kick. She was a tour guide, like I was, and her older brother, Eric, was the head guard. One day I caught Eric, Cinthy, and three other guards loading crates of museum property into the back of Eric’s ground-truck.”
Faith stood up and went to the small chiller in the corner and retrieved a bottle of water. She offered some to the Falcorans but they declined. She opened the bottle and took a long drink, then sat back down.
“Cinthy shot me with a laser gun,” Faith said. “Three times, in the abdomen. That’s why I have the special diet.” She took another drink. “I remember nothing after that until I woke up in a healing tank weeks later. Healing tanks can’t regenerate complex organs if large portions of them are missing. The laser did a lot of damage, including burning away two thirds of my stomach.
“When I was removed from the tank I was told that our supervisor, Mrs. Henders, who’d sent me down to find Cinthy, arrived a couple of minutes later looking for me. Eric shot her, but before she died she was able to activate an alarm. The guards not on Eric’s and Cinthy’s payroll arrived in seconds, the police shortly after that. Eric got into a laser battle with police and killed one of them. He was wounded, and captured. Cinthy and the other three guards escaped.
“Eric was charged with both murders, among other things. Cinthy was charged with attempted murder, or would be if she and the other guards were ever caught.
“I went home and tried to get on with my life, until I realized Cinthy wasn’t going to allow that. I started getting threatening calls, messages, little notes left in my ground-car or shoved under my apartment door. She blamed me for everything, and was determined that I was going to pay for destroying her life, and her brother’s.
“The law enforcement agency couldn’t track her down?” Tristan asked when Faith paused to take another drink. She shook her head.
“They got away with a truckload of museum art and artifacts worth millions, even on the black market. More than enough to pay for virtually anyone’s silence. They could have been giving orders from Terien for all anyone knew. The only thing their money couldn’t do was get Eric out of prison, and they tried, more than once from what I was told.”
“It’s not possible to bribe anyone on a prison planet,” Tristan said. “They’re set up with too many fail safes.”
“I know,” Faith said. “But Eric hadn’t been sent to a prison planet. He was still on Earth, waiting for his murder trials. The last one wouldn’t take place for another eighteen to twenty-four months.
“My parents decided to send me to Jasan, to the women’s sanctuary. They’d done a lot of research, and decided that was the safest place for me. They wanted me to stay there until Cinthy made a mistake and got herself arrested.
“I was in the sanctuary for two months when I got word that my parents had died in a ground car explosion. It took me six weeks to get back to Earth. They couldn’t hold the funeral that long, but my sisters planned a memorial service to take place the day after I was due to return. Only my ship was late. It didn’t land until the day of the service.
“I grabbed a cab and went straight to the church. It was pure dumb luck that I spotted Cinthy standing behind a tree out front. The moment I saw her I realized that she was responsible for the deaths of my parents. She’d done it to lure me back to Earth, and it worked. I have no proof, of course. I just knew it. I told the cab driver to take me straight back to the spaceport. Then I picked a world at random and bought a ticket.
“I felt almost safe for a while. No one knew where I was, not even Grace. Then one day, over a year later, a woman I didn’t know walked up to me in a park on Terien. She told me she was an agent of the Directorate on Earth, and that they’d been searching for me because my sister, Grace, had died.”
Faith emptied her water bottle, then sat picking at the label for a few moments while they waited patiently for her to continue. “At first I thought Cinthy had gotten to Grace. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, she was kidnapped because some group of sickos called the Brethren learned that I went to Jasan, and mistook her for me. They all died because of me. First my parents. Then Grace.” Faith got up and tossed the bottle in the waste bin, then got another bottle of water. Talking was thirsty work.