Raven met that piercing, raptor’s gaze without flinching. She could feel that survivor’s shadow-self separate from the back of her, circling the cop with chisel in hand, hunting for the soft heel of him.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
The look on his face had a sound, and it was the sound of a chisel striking in under armor.
“No,” he said. He glanced away at Kane, who was still facedown and motionless.
Raven followed his eyes. She could see the faint rise and fall of Kane’s breath, but it looked shallow and he showed no signs of waking up. One of his arms was still stretched out, the claws curled and the blood that tipped them dulled by dust. She could reach out a hand and touch him, but she didn’t dare even to look at him too long. She said, “Are people really looking for me?”
“Yes.”
“Cops?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him; he was still gazing down at Kane. “Do they think I killed those people?” she asked.
He hesitated and finally met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.
This was the part where panic should be chewing her up from the insides out, she knew, but it wasn’t. Calm had her in a grip so profound it made her head feel swollen. All her thoughts had weight and substance, all her nerves were awake and tingling, but she couldn’t make herself not be calm. “I didn’t,” she said, and looked down at her hands where they gripped the ground. She had no fingernails and she couldn’t remember biting them or anything. “I was there, but…how was I supposed to stop him? You tell me. How?”
She looked at him. He looked away.
“He did things to me,” Raven said.
The lady was coming back with a pack in her arms, bigger than Kane’s, dark blue instead of black, with a funny star-like symbol over the lid, but made of the same stuff. She watched the cop open it with a slide of his finger along the seam and her heart ached a little. Her own hand went to pull Kane’s pack a little tighter against her side.
“She’s hurt pretty bad,” the lady said, circling Raven’s leg with a worried look. “Tagen, if we take her to a hospital—”
“I know.” The cop loaded drops of liquid from an assortment of vials into the spray-gun and held out his hand for Raven’s arm.
She offered it, her expression carefully blanked. “I’m clean,” she said. “He cleaned me. So that…it was safe. For him.”
The cop’s jaw tightened. That was all. He emptied the contents of the spray-gun into Raven’s arm in a hiss of air, and then put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her onto her back. “Hold her, Daria. This is going to hurt,” he told Raven, in eerie half-remembered echo of Kane’s words to her that first awful night as she lay in convulsions beneath him.
Her nod came with fresh tears and she clapped both hands over her mouth and shut her eyes as the cop untied the shirt binding her leg and had himself a look. She felt one of his hands close on her thigh just above her knee and then the other wrapped around her ankle. “Steady,” he said, and pulled.
Raven meant to scream—he was clearly the sort of cop that reacted best to a girl screaming—but the sound of her bones grinding up and snapping back into place deafened her and after that, all sounds and colors kind of ebbed away like the tide on a flat, sickly beach. She stared glassily up at the lady’s face, silhouetted by the sun behind her, and waited to see if she was going to throw up or faint or what. The cop was still doing things to her down there, but she couldn’t even manage to move her eyes enough to see what. Eventually, things began to fade back in.
“…car seems to be working,” the lady was saying. “I think I can siphon some gas out of their tank and put it into ours. Enough to get us to a gas station, anyway.” A tactful pause came here, during which the lady’s fingers brushed thoughtfully at Raven’s brow. “What are you going to do with him?”
“He is unconscious,” the cop said sourly. “Killing him now would make for an awkward report.”
A touching tribute to cop-hood everywhere.
“He is arrested,” the cop continued. “And I will take him to Jota and see him imprisoned for his crimes. That is what I am going to do with him.”
“What’s going to happen when he wakes up?”
“I have…sedative…enough to ensure that does not happen.” He rose, a tower in the shape of a man, and Raven managed with effort to look directly at him.
“What are you going to do with her?” the lady asked softly.
Silence. Raven stayed as still as possible, staring at him without smiling and without speaking.
“We will take her with us,” the cop said at last, and threw out a sigh that held more then just a little snarl in it. “For now.”
And with that, Raven had to be content.
For now.
*
As with every mission that Tagen had known, the empty time following a difficult capture were weighted with doubts and lingering disappointments. The pursuit was done and now all that he had suffered in bringing it about had passed into the realm of the inconsequential. E’Var lay in the hold of Daria’s groundcar, by all appearances as innocent a passenger as any other, with all his history of violence suppressed by sleep. And Tagen himself, once more superfluous, sat and gazed out the window at the passing world, trusting to Daria to take them where they needed to be. He needed only to say, “East, presently,” or “Further south,” as the groundcar circled towards the hiding place of his ship.
They had made one stop to refuel, and Daria had gone into one of the roadside shops and left Tagen alone in the groundcar with the female who called herself Raven. She spoke to him in a low and listless voice from the seat behind him where she huddled with Tagen’s uniform jacket around her shoulders and Grendel sleeping happily in her arms. To hear of the monstrosities that had been performed on her in those tones of apathy and exhaustion had been among the most difficult acts Tagen had ever had to perform in a lifetime of service to the Fleet.
“He made me ask,” she would say, as Tagen stared out at the highway and the passing human cars. The sun was so bright, the sky so blue and peaceful. There was no evil apparent in this world, and yet: “He made me thank him.”
Daria returned ages later with bandages to dress all their wounds, a new shirt for Raven, and a medical brace she called a ‘crutch’ so that she could help Raven hobble to the station’s privy and back again. And then there was more road, more silence swelling out the groundcar’s interior. More time slipping like sand through Tagen’s fingers, bringing him inexorably to the moment when he would leave this Earth.
And now here it was, the moment come at last. They had left the last road behind them, driving on uneven ground at a walking pace, until Tagen had called them to halt. He had stepped out into the seemingly-empty clearing, walked to the low dimples of flattened grass that marked the landing struts of the shielded ship, made a few adjustments in mid-air and behold, a star-cruiser.
Now Tagen stood before his ship, the airlock open and ready to receive him and his prisoner, looking down on Daria’s face. She tried to smile, an effort that stabbed him to the heart. He was intensely aware of the other human watching them from the groundcar, and it made him over-conscious of the very little distance between them.
He stepped back, and then, pretending not to see the hurt in Daria’s eyes at that withdrawal, went to the hatch of the groundcar for E’Var.
Grendel was curled comfortably upon the killer’s chest, purring loudly. The cat complained at being moved aside and complained still further when Tagen pulled the unconscious man onto his shoulder rather than pause to rub the furry head. Grendel tried to follow, but Tagen shut the hatch. He felt the cat’s eyes on him, confused and stung, as he walked back to the ship. Daria watched him come with the same hurt expression, but she at least dropped her gaze when he met it.
Tagen passed her, his arm just brushing her shoulder, and then stopped. He shifted the dead weight of his prisoner and, glancing awkwardly over the lump of E’Var to see her, said, “Would you…like to see my ship?”
She blinked at him, blinked again, and finally faintly smiled. “Sure.”
Tagen went ahead of her, bending to carry his prone burden through the tight airlock, and then again through the narrow door to the holding cell. He set E’Var down, rolled him onto his back, and strapped him into the prisoner’s flight harness. After a moment, and not without a sour sense of obligation, Tagen brought out a fluid pack and raised a vein in E’Var’s limp arm.
He heard a soft step behind him and moved to allow Daria sight of his actions, but it was the other female, Raven, he saw when he turned. She had Grendel clutched tightly in her arms as she leaned on her brace and a Jotan chemist’s pack slung over one bruised shoulder. E’Var’s, no doubt. She never let it go far; there was something of hers in it, he thought, something E’Var had been keeping, tormenting her with its absence. Raven’s face was pale and blank and still damp from tears, reminding Tagen strongly of the seashore once the fickle tide had washed out and erased the day’s activities there. He did not trust this female. Which was an appalling reflection of his character, perhaps, but nonetheless.
Tagen returned his attention to his prisoner, inserting the line that would keep E’Var hydrated for the travel back to Jota and securing it with bonding paste. “You should not be walking,” he told her.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“I do not know.”
The answer was cruelly laughable. He was a man of law. He knew very well.
Tagen activated the drip, checked the instrument panel, and finally stood up and turned to face her. Raven’s eyes remained on him, solemn, helpless, unblinking. He gestured to her and she backed out of the cell with a broken obedience all too familiar to him after recovering so many slaves. Tagen followed her, shut the door and sealed it, and then stood, staring down at her.
No, he did not trust her, but neither could he get his teeth into just why. She was not the twin of the blonde human Tagen had apprehended at the fair, not the bitter and raging accomplice he had expected. His eyes told him this was a victim, taken through no fault of her own and molded to E’Var’s sadistic whims. Freeing her when he knew the human Fleet was already seeking her for E’Var’s crimes would only condemn her to imprisonment and perhaps death.
His gut, though, his gut told him an entirely different and darker tale. His gut told him to be wary of the face that never showed emotion and the eyes that had a way of lingering on E’Var’s body when they had nowhere else to go. His gut told him that this was perhaps not so much a beaten human as it was a terribly sly one.
But then, he knew already the limits of his gift for insight. And after so much time on Earth, so many days of relentless summer, and so many conniving humans on episodes of Daria’s despised law program, he was aware that he couldn’t be very objective. And, as was beginning to feel disturbingly like habit these days, when he felt the need for wisdom, he found himself seeking Daria. She was standing in the doorway between the main bay and the pilot’s pit, hugging herself as if for warmth and gazing back at him with her eerie sympathy.
Tagen looked back at Raven, his talons flexing on the floor, resisting the urge to tak them even though she, as a human, couldn’t possibly read anything meaningful in the gesture. “If the choice were yours alone,” he said slowly, “what would you choose?”
She did not answer. Her eyes fell from his, stared at the floor between her feet. Her hand passed through Grendel’s fur, nearly in exact tandem with the cat’s contented rumbles, but she looked to be a thousand years detached from her physical self. A slave-look.
“Understand that I cannot offer you a return to the life you knew before. Not in any way. I could perhaps take you elsewhere here on Earth—”
“What good would that do?” she asked strengthlessly. “They’ll find me anywhere I go. They’ll arrest me.” She pulled Grendel up and drew a cat-scented breath, hiding her face from him. “They’ll kill me.”
Tagen frowned. His eyes sought Daria’s. She looked away and nodded once.
“How was I supposed to stop him?” Raven was saying, still without emotion. “I couldn’t even stop him from hurting me.”
Slave-words, and all the right ones. Tagen’s talons flexed again and again, he stilled them. In all his years of service and after all the encounters with recovered humans from every form of slavery, he had never met one so evocative with all the things she said…and didn’t say.
“Can’t I come with you?” Raven asked suddenly. She still did not look at him and her shoulders were bowed, without hope. “I don’t care what you do with me, I just can’t…stay here. Please. Can’t I just come with you?”
E’Var’s blonde human had asked virtually the same thing, albeit in a cruder fashion. Tagen’s doubts itched at him.
Raven’s eyes peeked at him behind the masking strands of her hair. “Please, don’t leave me here. Please. I can…I can be nice.” She cringed as she said it.
Tagen’s jaw clenched and this time it was his claws that flexed, wanting the visceral and wholly unprofessional satisfaction of ripping E’Var open. His doubts did not disappear, but they were diminished. No one could fabricate such an unhappy offer.
“I will,” he said finally. “No, do not mistake me, human. I will not harm you.” He started to say more, sighed, and pulled down a jump seat and gestured for her to sit. He took the cat from her arms and once Daria had come to collect the protesting animal, half-knelt to put his eyes more on level with Raven’s and said, “We need to have an understanding,” he said.
Raven’s face underwent a buckling of unmasked anguish and she clapped a shaking hand to cover the eyes that welled with water.
Tagen looked helplessly back at Daria, but she merely touched his shoulder in silent commiseration and went outside.
Tagen waited, searching the corners of the star cruiser’s ceiling for hints on how to proceed. Slaves did a lot of crying. In the past, however, he’d been able to simply move on and leave them to it while he dealt with a fresh one. He’d never had to console one before, and in light of her offer to be…nice, he was loathe to even touch her. Fortunately, Raven’s tears abated on their own. She swiped at her eyes with bruising force, and then picked up the chemist’s pack that had been sitting at her side to hold on her lap in Grendel’s absence. She gripped it until her knuckles whitened, staring fixedly at the floor as unhappiness still twisted her features.