Girl From Above #4: Trust (16 page)

“We did have time.” Tears glistened in her eyes then broke free and rolled down her face.

I wanted to wipe them away, to wipe the pain away. She should live. She deserved it, more than me.

“Caleb, don’t you see? You gave me forever in those moments. Please, don’t be sad.”

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the glass. “I need you.”

“You don’t. You’re a good man inside. I see you.”

A warning buzzed. I opened my eyes and looked into hers, so brittle, so fragile. I wished I’d held her longer, said the things I’d wanted to say, taken her away to all the places, lived the dreams.

“I see you too.” It wasn’t fair. “Count the stars, One.”

“I’m not afraid.”

No, she wouldn’t be afraid, because she was One.
I wish we’d had more time.

The buzzer grew louder and deeper. Escaping air viciously hissed behind the door. I spread my fingers on the glass, over hers, and looked into her eyes. Ice crawled across her hair, her cheek, and snapped over her lips. I watched its terribly slow progress through unfocused tears. Hoarfrost clouded her eyes. As she breathed her last moisture-rich breath, the window fogged, and frost scattered across the glass. I knew when she’d left me. A hollow, empty place opened up inside, and even though I could still see her face, see the smile resting on her lips, she was gone.

F
ive months later
.

“
M
ister Shepperd
, are you quite sure you don’t know anything about these illegal gambling rumors?”

“Quite sure.” I poured Officer Jack a shot of Old-Earth whiskey—one of the finest I had in stock—and shoved it in his direction. “You’re welcome to check out back.”

His eyes brightened, like he’d hit the jackpot.

“After you get a warrant.”

The delight in his eyes clouded. He threw the whiskey back in one gulp, hissed, and grumbled an imaginative curse that brought a smile to my lips.

I liked Jack; he was a smart guy. Naive, but smart, and new enough around these parts to think he could clean up Ganymede and all the other original system stopover ports. He also knew I’d won Tink’s Bar from Bruno in an illegal card game like the one Officer Jack was now accusing me of organizing.

“Luca says hi.” He shoved the empty glass back in my direction.

I poured him a few more fingers. “She does, huh?”

It was early. The cruiseliners with their cargo of tourists had come and gone. Paying customers were few and far between, and the staff had all bounced off shift before they had to clock in again in a few hours. The pause between mayhem: one of my favorite times and about the only time I manned the bar.

“Still sings your praises,” Jack added, the grumbling undertone making it perfectly clear what he thought of his sister’s appraisal of me.

I smiled, tucked the whiskey out of the way beneath the bar, and leaned an elbow on the bar top. “That’s odd, seein’ as we’ve never officially met.”

It wouldn’t do for Jack’s sister to associate herself with someone who skirted the law, someone like me. Not even if I’d hypothetically saved her shapely ass when she’d gotten herself mixed up with the wrong sorta folk out of Calisto.

Helped by the interesting information I had about his not-so-sweet sister, information that could jeopardize his rising career as an original systems peacekeeper, Jack wouldn’t look too closely at what I may or may not be organizing in the back rooms.

I smiled, he smiled, and we both gave a light chuckle, because this was how the nine systems worked, and sometimes when the new law didn’t have teeth, people like me did.

“I never thought I’d be patrolling Jupiter’s moons, trying to keep the peace,” Jack mused, tapping his fingers on his glass.

I’d done some digging when he came to me for help; I’d been stung before. A year ago, he’d been a grunt in fleet. Since fleet no longer existed, Jack had signed up as a peacekeeper, same as a lot of fleet’s throwaways. Still, I knew that look, caught it in the mirror sometimes. He missed the black.

“I hear that.” I trailed off as the doors opened and a hooded figure drifted in from the orange-lit boardwalk.

Jack shot me a side-eyed questioning look. I raised a brow and stepped back from the bar, giving me enough room to reach the pistol taped under the bar top. I’d never gotten along with hooded folk.

“Captain Shepperd?” the girl asked, pushing her hood back. She was a slight thing, a few years younger than me—without the mileage. She had close-cropped, black hair, pert lips, shrewd brown eyes, and a confident swagger.

Jack’s side-glance had turned curious. I tensed. Now the tame police officer would go checking after a Captain Shepperd and I’d have more questions to answer. I should have used a pseudonym, but then, it wasn’t like I’d planned to settle on Ganymede.

“Ain’t nobody called me captain in a while,” I replied, sizing the girl up. She didn’t look like much. She wore a multitude of layers like many of the port-drifters who literally wore what they owned.

“But you do have a ship?” she asked, planting herself on a stool and looking up at me, head cocked, eyes expectant.

“Who’s asking?”

She shrugged.

Two could play the vague game.
“Nah, I don’t have a ship—”

“The
Fortuitous
?”

I snatched the pistol free from its hiding place, cocked it, and aimed it square between her eyes. “Who are you? No bullshit.”

Nobody knew the name of my ship. All those who did were dead.

She blinked and peeled back her ragged coat, checking me for permission before reaching inside. My trigger finger tightened as the little voice in my head told me to scare her out of her wits and send her packing. But curiosity—that fucking bitch
curiosity
—had me holding fast.

She slowly, carefully, withdrew a folded slip of paper and held it up, letting me get a good look at the innocent folded square. I glanced at Jack, who shrugged but eyed the pistol warily. I wasn’t about to shoot a girl in Tink’s—not in front of a lawman—but neither of them knew me well enough to take a chance on playing the hero.

The girl set the folded slip of paper down on the bar and pushed it over.

I snatched it up in my left hand, making them jump, and unfolded it. A credit token fell out, the kind with a fixed value determined by the sender. The display on this one held a steady
30C
. A memory tugged from somewhere deep, where I’d buried it cycles ago. Thirty credits … I turned it over in my hand—
I was worth at least thirty credits—
and tucked it in my pocket.

“Who sent you?”

She dropped her gaze to the piece of paper. I did the same and noticed a scrawled message inside.

Fuck.

“Watch the stock,” I told Jack, tucking the pistol against my back, veering round the end of the bar, and heading out the door.

“What?” he spluttered.

“Just watch the bar,” I called back. “And don’t go poking out back. I’ll know!”

I broke into a run, heart pounding the same as my boots on the boardwalk. Ganymede’s orange-tinged haze swirled beneath inadequate lamps. Humid, heavy air laced my tongue.

Thirty fucking credits.

Debt’s paid.

It couldn’t be.

By the time I reached the old maintenance hangars, sweat crawled down the back of my neck and the old wound in my side radiated the kind of protest I’d suffer for later.

I dashed through my old hangar’s rusted side door and skidded to a halt. I’d expected the warbird gone—stolen.
Debt’s paid
. But the raptor loomed large, her bulk filling the hangar from floor to ceiling, untouched and still where I’d left her for months, with patched-up covers draped over her outline.
Fortuitous.

And below her overhanging bridge section stood a woman. She had her hands on her hips, within easy reach of the two holstered pistols, and her face turned up at the ship. I wasn’t sure she was real. A diffused orange glow flooded in through the filthy hangar windows, throwing her long shadow far beneath
Fortuitous
while hiding the details of her face. I didn’t need to see her face to know her.
“Bring it, little man,”
that cocky stance seemed to say.
“I’m too good for you.”

“No.” I threw my hands up, pistol still palmed. “No”—turned on my heel—“no-no-no.”

The denials echoed around the hangar, chasing each other into the murk.

“Cale.”

Fuck.

I spun and marched toward her. “You died!”

She turned her head and raised an eyebrow in a precise arc. She’d dyed her short hair scarlet red, the same color as the Candes’ home planet sunset. It shone, even in this pathetic light. The shadows cut her Asgard scar deeper into her cheek. For someone who’d been declared dead, she looked mighty fine in her flight fatigues. She’d tied the flight suit’s arms around her waist. Her tank top clung in all the right places, revealing toned arms and the infamous dragon tattoo coiled around her bicep. I had no doubt.

“You definitely died!” I said, failing to keep the shrill note of alarm from my voice. “I was there.”

She didn’t say anything, just watched me stride toward her.

“How-in-the-fucking-how?!”

“Escape pod. It embedded in a residential block.” She paused, her green eyes flicking to the pistol in my hand. “I used the remote to blow the harrier, once I was free. I kept my head down, waited for the dust to settle, and then bribed my way off Janus.”

Escape pod.
A fucking escape pod.
“How wonderful for you. And you didn’t think to tell me this part of your plan?”

I kept walking, not yet sure what I’d do when I reached her.

She shrugged. “You said we’d go our separate ways. I was doing you a favor.”

Doing me a favor.

“Making a clean break,” she added.

Making a clean fucking break.

Rage fizzed through my veins, or shock, or both. For the first time in five months, I needed a fucking drink—the whole bottle.
She
did that to me. Made me nuts. Made me want to wrap my hands around her neck and throttle her.

“You … You …” I stopped a few strides away. I mean, what the fuck could I say? Five months ago she’d flown the Candes’ harrier into Hung’s towers. “Fuck, Fran.”

I took a step closer and forcibly stopped myself, not entirely sure if I might do something stupid like kiss her, or punch her, or maybe shoot her. Instead, I loosely pointed the pistol at her middle. “I’m gonna kill you, and I’m gonna make it stick.”

She gave me a knowing look. “C’mon, Cale. We both know this is just foreplay.”

Foreplay?!
I laughed. The sound of it came out all twisted and wrong. “I’ll dump your body out of a Mede trash chute. How’s that for foreplay?”

Fran snaked her arms crossed and sighed, not the least concerned that I’d carry out any of the threats. “Before you do, I have a job.”

“A job?” I deadpanned and glared. She comes back from the dead, looking right as Old Earth rain—more than right, she looked hot, all straight-backed and commander-like and shit, goddammit—and she had a job?

I scrambled around my head for something to say and came back empty.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m on a schedule here. Can you have this”—she waved a hand at me—“breakdown or whatever it is later, once we’re back-in-black?”

I made a noise—part scoff, part fuck-off growl—and backed away a few steps. “I’m not going back in the black with you, sweetheart. You’re bad for my health. You couldn’t pay me a million credits to fly with you.”

This was insane.
She
was insane. How was I even talking with her?

“I will,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ll pay you.”

My runaway thoughts stuttered. I shut my mouth, not entirely sure how long it had been hanging open. “Why?”

“Isn’t that how it usually works. I need something fixed, you’re a fixer …”

“You don’t
need
me.
Fortuitous
is your fucking ship. You know all the flight codes. You could have flown her out of here without me knowing.”

“Right, I could have.” She chuckled lightly and broke her gaze away to briefly run her eyes over the ship. I might have caught a glimmer of regret, or maybe some sort of pensive reluctance, but she quickly buried the fleeting expression behind a wide, sarcastic smile. “Tink’s Cale? Really? I thought you had some standards, low as they are. But Tink’s?”

Now that my heart had stopped battering against my chest and the shock was wearing off, my thoughts came together. She needed me for something. Something about her job required either information only I knew or one of my rare talents, so rare I wasn’t sure I had any. Whatever it was, she would set me up for the fall. I didn’t need the heat. I had the bar and some shady dealings to keep the blood pumping. I didn’t need her or the black.

I dragged a hand across my mouth.

“No.”
There, that wasn’t so hard.
“Take the ship if you want her. I haven’t flown her since—Anyway, I told you, I’m done.”

I yanked my gaze away from her and marched back the way I’d come, one foot in front of the other. My refusal had sounded pretty good. Maybe I’d actually meant it? But it didn’t stop my insides from twisting up tighter and tighter with each step.

“You’re not done,
Captain
. You belong in the black.”

I kept walking, even as her words chased me down. God fuckin’ dammit. Why couldn’t she just stay dead? I had a business to run, and … not much else, but it was a start. It was honest—sometimes. And then there was Jack’s sister, whatever her name was … Luca. She was … nice.

“C’mon, Cale. Barman at Tink’s?”

I stopped, threaded my fingers through my hair, and dragged my hand down the back of my neck, telling myself not to turn the fuck around, and half turned.

“Captain of the
Fortuitous,
”
she continued.
“Cruising through the black, fleet nowhere in sight? That’s freedom. That’s you.”

She pulled the classic “cocked head, wry smile” look but stopped short of fluttering her lashes.

“There’s really a job?” I asked.

“Oh, there’s a job. But I need
Fortuitous
and her captain.

Shit
.

She’d had me the second I laid eyes on her. This dance, my protests, was all fake. There wasn’t any chance of me walking away, and we both knew it.

I made a show of scratching at my chin and pretending to mull over her words. “You do owe me a ship.”

Fran’s smile grew, reeling me in. “Says you.”

I started making my way back toward her, taking it slow, like I hadn’t already decided. “How much you payin’?”

“What are you worth?”

Now it was my turn to smile, remembering the credit token and its pathetic thirty credits. “Prices have gone up. These are new times, yah know.”

Stopping up close, I tucked the pistol away and dragged my gaze up the length of her. When I got to her eyes, questions burned there. Questions and humor, and I might have caught a glimpse of wicked delight too.

“We had some good times,” she added, tilting her face once more toward
Fortuitous.

“You spied on me, set me up, and tried to kill me. I’m not sure
good
is the word I’d use.”

“Foreplay.”

If that was foreplay, I was doing it wrong.

I followed her gaze to a section of
Fortuitous’s
uncovered hull. The ship had taken some damage when we’d rolled into Earth’s atmosphere and burned out the engines. Her panels bore the pockmarks and scars of unguided re-entry. I’d brought the ship down on Ganymede for repairs right after I watched One die, and I’d only taken her up again to return to Old Earth, to the clifftop where I laid One’s body in the earth. I’d tried to keep One, to see if she’d wake up, but those days had been endless, whiskey-soaked waking nightmares. It took a while for me to realize waiting for her to come back was killing me. She wasn’t coming back. She’d lived her life and chosen her fate. At least, where I’d buried her, she had the best view in the nine systems.