Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (33 page)

“What do you want to say to him?” Vezali asked.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Raena grimaced at the shrill edge to her voice and added more quietly, “I don’t think that’s going to get me what I need.”

‘You’re a pretty good actress,” Coni said, and again Raena wasn’t sure if there was condemnation or praise in her voice. “Can’t you just sweet-talk him?”

“I’m not sure I could pull it off,” Raena admitted. “I want to explode at him when I see him. If I lead him on first, that might make it worse over all. He could decide the ultimate fuck-you would be to send the Messiah drug out of our reach into the galaxy, where it can do the most possible harm. More than I want him to stop messing with me, I want to protect the galaxy from another all-out war. And I want Gavin to lead us to Outrider, if that’s possible. I want to know what his deal is.”

“I’m not entirely clear why you think Outrider is involved,” Vezali said. “You’ve only seen him once in your dreams—”

“Twice,” Raena corrected.

“And once in real life, more than twenty years past, right? That doesn’t guarantee he’s still alive, especially if he was using his own product, or that he’s peddling it again. You’ve dreamt about the Templar still being alive. Not everything you dream is true.”

Raena nodded, point taken. Still, she had a real sense that this thing was bigger than just one man’s obsession with a woman he couldn’t keep.

“If Outrider’s not involved,” she conceded slowly, “where did Gavin get the Messiah he’s using?”

Coni said, “His men were looting everything but the bodies from the Templar tombworld, right?”

“You think Kavanaugh’s team found a crate of Messiah in one of the tombs?” Raena asked.

“We know the stone preserves whatever’s stored inside it, correct? Maybe there isn’t a new source for the drug at all. Maybe there’s only one very old source.”

Raena tried to picture the day Gavin opened a Templar casket, expecting to find jewelry or sculpture or something else beautiful, and instead found pouches of gummy white chemicals. How had he recognized the Messiah for what it was?

Then she remembered him telling her about waking up on the floor of his ship, stuck to the deck by the Messiah the Imperial soldiers had spilled around him. She remembered how he told her that he’d held his breath for the longest time, terrified of inhaling the drug as he cleaned himself up.

“How would he know how to take it?” she wondered aloud. “Were there how-to directions in the old transcripts?”

“It was supposed to be vaporized before it could be inhaled,” Coni said. “Among the few pieces of evidence they collected in the past were some of the vapor machines.”

“Did they look Templar-made?” Vezali asked.

“No. They were really simple contraptions, almost childlike. Anyone could make or operate one.”

“The perfect bait,” Raena said. “Make it simple and put it in the hands of fanatics willing to die to drag down their planetary governments. I don’t suppose there was ever any indication where the vaporizers were made?”

“Actually, each surviving one was different. They all seemed to have been cobbled together on the planets where they were found.”

“So someone somewhere was teaching potential clients how to make their own vaporizers,” Raena guessed.

Vezali followed that thought up with, “It’s possible the instructions are still floating around somewhere, waiting to be found.”

“Yes,” Coni said. “I didn’t find them as I researched, but it’s possible.”

“In all the hives of addicts they uncovered, did they ever find Messiah itself? If they had, is the chemical signature online?” Raena asked. “Maybe someone is synthesizing it again.”

“No. That is one of the weirdest things: in every case when a den of addicts was captured, all traces of the drug were gone. It was as if someone—maybe Outrider—tidied up and left only the bodies behind.”

“Did anyone ever survive their addiction?” Raena asked. “You said some of the junkies had been captured alive …”

“They’re all dead now,” Coni reported. “I checked. The way the drug works, it burns through the body, disrupting cell replication. The addicts don’t just look old, their bodies stop repairing themselves. They aren’t aged because the drug has eaten up all their time—although that was a theory for a while, until the autopsy evidence came in—they’re aged because they are destroyed at a cellular level. All of the addicts located alive quickly succumbed to diseases associated with extreme advanced age in humans.”

Raena tried to sum it all up. “Okay. So Gavin found some Messiah drug, helpfully identified in Imperial Standard, in a Templar tomb, alongside a set of easy-to-follow instructions on how to use it and a machine for making it ingestible.”

“That seems far more likely than this mysterious barely-identified pusher who comes out of nowhere after all these years of anonymity carrying a universally banned substance that he shares with your ex-boyfriend, just so Sloane can mess with your head.” Coni spoke so quickly that her words tumbled over each other. “This Outrider guy is used to bigger game boards than one man’s bedroom.”

Not insulted, Raena asked, “What if Outrider worked for the Templar? What if he was only the front, and they handled all the manufacture and distribution of the Messiah? As the plague was taking them down, they put the last of their supply into their tombs. Maybe Outrider was supposed to come and get it, but he couldn’t get the slab open? Or he was afraid to come and fiddle with the tombs, just like Thallian was.”

“But how would he know that your Gavin found the drug?”

“I’ve always thought of him as a spider, sitting in the middle of his web. He’d know when any of the strings twitched somewhere.”

When Raena finished, silence filled her cabin.

“Okay,” she said. “That sounds crazy, even to me. Forget I suggested it.”

Vezali pointed out, “None of this gets us any closer to what you’re going to say to Sloane if we can reach him.”

“True. Do you have a suggestion?”

“Could you tell him you’ve been thinking about him? Tell him you have been rethinking how things ended, that you’d like to see him?”

Raena smiled. “That would be perfect. I’ll feel better if I don’t have to lie to him.”

Secretly, she was entertained that it took the one of them without complicated companionship issues to come up with the simplest solution.

Kavanaugh went back to the
Sundog
and left a couple of messages for Sloane. He wasn’t sure how successful any of them would be for eliciting a response, but so far, that was all he’d been called upon to do.

He pulled out the octagonal Templar box that was his only souvenir from his days robbing graves for Gavin Sloane. When he touched the box just right, its top irised open in the most elegant way possible. Inside it coiled the lock of black hair as long as his leg.

When Raena walked out of that tomb, her hair had been crazy long. Sloane asked Kavanaugh to build her a bathtub. The only thing Raena wanted in the whole galaxy, after twenty years of imprisonment, had been a bubble bath. As soon as she got her hair washed, she hacked it all off with a knife. Kavanaugh snuck in later and collected this lock as a memento.

Kavanaugh wondered if she’d had the
Veracity
outfitted with a tub, then laughed aloud at himself. That was an inappropriate direction for his thoughts to zoom off into. Clearly, he’d been alone much too long. For all he knew now, Raena had hooked up with the girl with all the tentacles.

Yeah, that train of thought was an improvement
, he chided himself, shifting uncomfortably.

He touched the silken hair, uncertain why he’d kept it. Originally, he’d told himself that it was evidence to give to Ariel, a way to prove that her sister was still alive. In the end, he hadn’t needed any proof.

Yet he still kept it.

He thought back to finding Raena on that bounty hunter’s ship twenty-five years ago. She had looked so fragile then, like a doll made of spun glass. All he’d wanted to do had been to cradle her in his arms, to protect her from the bad men in the galaxy.

After that, she’d run away from Doc’s ship, run toward Gavin, and gotten captured by Thallian. In the end, she got sentenced by the Emperor to be imprisoned in her tomb. Pretty much, the bad men had lined up to take a swing at her.

When Kavanaugh broke her out of that tomb—and after he’d gotten over his immediate, overwhelming fear of her—those protective feelings had come rushing back. He still wanted to take care of her. And by then he knew that the bad men in the galaxy included Gavin Sloane.

So what was Kavanaugh doing here, now? Still yearning to protect Raena?

This time, he realized, was different. This time, she had actually asked for his help.

He knew what she was. He knew when he’d found her the first time that she had killed the bounty hunter who had been frozen to the deck, although even now Kavanaugh wasn’t entirely sure how she’d done it. He’d seen the security footage of Raena killing Thallian’s henchmen in the souk on Kai. He knew she’d gone to the Thallian homeworld and killed every Thallian there, boy and man. She was a killer who wouldn’t hesitate to kill again, to protect herself or those she considered her friends.

But she wasn’t the first killer Kavanaugh had met, only the first he’d befriended. Twice now that he knew of, and probably more times that he didn’t, Raena had passed up opportunities to kill him. He supposed that was because she counted him amongst her friends.

It wasn’t much to base a friendship on, he knew, but judging from the life she led, Raena probably didn’t know how to make real friends. Not with humans, anyway. She seemed to be doing a good job cobbling together a surrogate family out of the gaggle of aliens on the
Veracity
.

The
Veracity’s
crew were all kids, though. Kavanaugh understood then that Raena had called on him because, when she confronted Gavin Sloane, she didn’t want hackers, games players, and media pirates to watch her back. She wanted an adult. A soldier.

He looked down into the octagonal box at the black coil of hair and wondered over it: Raena had been brave enough to go alone into a whole nest of Thallians, but she wanted backup when she caught up with Gavin Sloane. Was she afraid she’d lose her nerve when it came to someone for whom she had actually professed love? Or was she afraid she wouldn’t be able to stay her hand if she needed to?

He wasn’t sure how he felt about watching Raena kill Gavin, if it came to that. Gavin had pushed his way into Raena’s head—and Kavanaugh and Ariel’s heads, too, tangentially. That casual defilement required some response. As far as Kavanaugh was concerned, Raena had the most right to make it. Kavanaugh felt violated, though, and angry enough to want a piece of justice himself.

He supposed the only way he would ever know how the story spun out was to go along for the ride.

Mykah tapped on Raena’s door. “Am I welcome?”

“Always,” she called. “Come in. You’ll have to sit on the floor unless you brought a chair.” She and Vezali sat on the bed, while Coni had her desk chair.

“The floor is fine.” Mykah came in and left the door open behind him. “Are you hungry? I made naan and hummus.”

“Now you really are spoiling me.” Raena accepted one of the bottles of ale he handed around, but joined him on the floor to attack the warm flat bread.

“I realized you didn’t get to eat on Tengri, like the rest of us,” Mykah said. “So this is my apology for that—and for doubting you earlier.”

She looked up from the piece of naan she was swiping through the bean dip. “Mykah—all of you—I … Well, I had a long time to come to terms with my past. When I was in that tomb, there was nothing else to do. I know you have discovered piecemeal, after you took me in, what I have been capable of. I am determined not to be that person I was any more, but you have every right to be afraid of her. These nightmares have tested me, but more than anything else, they’ve reminded me to be grateful how much my life has changed.” She smiled at him, at all of them. “No apologies are needed.”

She tasted Mykah’s hummus and swooned for effect. “This really is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Before too long, drawn by the laughter, Haoun came in to join them, followed by Mellix and the kiisas. Steam settled into Raena’s lap, purring, as she leaned back against her bunk and listened to the crew enthuse about their adventures on Tengri. Mykah told about Kavanaugh and the Chameleon girls. Coni told about the bar fight at Ocho’s. Vezali had gone to a restaurant where you caught your own fish from a pond.

Raena was so comfortable and relaxed that it was easy to forget that she had a clingy ex-boyfriend somewhere in the galaxy who had been attacking her sleep for days on end. Knowing that she was not going crazy after all had changed everything. The sense of weight being lifted from her made her practically giddy.

“What do you plan to do, after we find Sloane?” Mykah asked.

“Oh, are you coming along?”

Mykah looked pointedly around the room at the others, before he spoke. “You took us out of our lives and gave us all this,” he gestured around vaguely at the ship and the others, and then paused uncomfortably. “Plus, you know … you’re one of us. We can’t have you facing off another homicidal ex-boyfriend. Alone. Again.”

Raena laughed, embarrassed and touched. “I wasn’t going to volunteer you. Both Kavanaugh and I have been affected by it. He knows Sloane much better than I ever did. Together, we’ll have to persuade him to turn over any Messiah he has left and connect us with Outrider, if he’s still alive.”

“And then Mellix and I will do an exposé on the Messiah drug.”

Mellix met Raena’s gaze and said, “Please. The galaxy needs to know about this.”

“The galaxy needs to be protected from it,” Raena corrected. “Stopping its spread is going to have to take precedence over the story. If you can accept that, I would be honored to have you along.”

“Agreed,” Mellix said.

Raena breathed out, feeling her chest unhitch. She was relieved to have them back her up.

Eventually, before she was ready, all the long hours, violent nightmares, and stress snuck up with her. Her head dropped forward suddenly, jolting her unpleasantly out of her contentment.