Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (34 page)

“Thank you all for coming in tonight,” she said sleepily, cutting across Haoun’s account of his winnings for the evening. “I hate to throw you out, but …”

The general exodus was more seemly than she might have expected.

“You, too,” she told Steam, trying to nudge it up.

Mellix bent down to scoop the kiisa into his arms. “They’re a pretty good judge of character,” he told her.

“Thank you.” She offered him a smile.

Mykah finished gathering the dishes and then paused in the doorway.

“Yes,” Raena said, before he could ask. “Lock me in tonight. We haven’t heard if Kavanaugh reached Gavin yet. I don’t want to take any chances.”

“I’m sorry,” he said as he closed the door.

Coni waited in the galley to help Mykah clean up from the impromptu party.

He smiled at her as he came in with his arms full. She rinsed the ale bottles while he loaded the dishwasher. “I really thought she’d gone crazy,” he admitted.

“So did she. But it’s a good measure of how much she’s changed that she asked for our help, then told you to protect us however you needed to.”

“Don’t tell me you weren’t frightened of her.”

Coni shrugged. Now that she thought about it, she realized she hadn’t been particularly afraid. She had been observing Raena since the free-running game on Kai. No doubt she could be lethal—the Thallians were proof of that—but in every other instance where she had a choice, Coni had seen Raena choose to stay her hand.

Mykah was case in point. Coni had expected the little woman would be grateful for his company, but she hadn’t rushed to drag him into her bed. Coni had read enough of Raena’s history to appreciate that sort of restraint was new for her.

“It’s going to be morning soon,” Coni said.

“We’d better get to bed, then.” Mykah took her hand and pulled her along after him.

The message chime rang, stirring her out of a deep, restful sleep. Raena gathered the coverlet around her bare midriff and scooted over to the computer to respond.

“I got through to Gavin,” Kavanaugh said. “I told him you were trying to contact him.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“No. He just typed in a reply.”

“What did he say?”

“He agreed to meet you.” Kavanaugh shrugged. A string of numbers ran across the bottom of the screen.

“Thanks, Tarik. I’ll give the coordinates to Haoun. Do you want to come along?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’d be good to see Sloane again. Do you have space for me on the
Veracity
?”

“I’ll ask Vezali to knock a cabin together for you.” She smiled, ran a hand through her hair and made it stand up on end. “It’ll be good to have you at my back.”

Raena waited to talk to Mellix until everyone was gathered for breakfast. She wanted the crew there as a check on her temper, because if she was sure of one thing, it was that you didn’t threaten Mellix.

Mykah had made some kind of sweet porridge full of cubed fruit. Raena let everyone begin to eat before she asked, “Mellix, do you know who I am?”

Haoun and Coni stopped bickering over a catamaran race to listen.

The journalist looked up from his bowl to meet her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I researched you last night while everyone was on shore leave. You were supposed to have been executed by the empire.”

Raena nodded.

“Some kind of Templar tech kept you alive?” he guessed.

“Yes. I was imprisoned just a hair over twenty years alone in a cave on the Templar tombworld.”

“You’ve never been charged with the assassinations you committed in the name of the Empire.”

Mykah started to defend her, but Raena cut him off. “No. I was punished for crimes against the Empire. The woman who was wanted as a war criminal is legally dead.”

Mellix switched subjects abruptly. “Is there more to the story of finding the Thallians?”

Raena said, “Yes.”

“Is Jonan Thallian dead?”

“Yes. Every Thallian responsible for spreading the Templar plague is dead.”

“Then I don’t think we need to threaten each other,” Mellix said.

“Mellix …” Mykah started again.

“I wasn’t planning to threaten you,” Raena told the journalist. “You’re not as afraid of death as I am of being revealed.”

The journalist’s whiskers twitched. “Mykah, I am a guest in your home. I owe my freedom to your crew and my life to Raena. I am not planning to reveal her to anyone. She wanted to make certain we understand each other. I think we do.”

“I just want to live my life and do some good in the galaxy,” Raena said.

“We all support that,” Haoun said. They clinked their coffee mugs together to toast the idea.

CHAPTER 16

A
s Kavanaugh predicted, Gavin was eager to see her. He encouraged her to come with all speed. To her relief, the nightmares stopped.

After the initial message, all communications to Sloane went unanswered. They didn’t know if they were walking into a trap, whether Outrider would be there, if there were other addicts than Sloane involved.

Raena forbade the others to come along. “You can monitor us,” she suggested, “but Kavanaugh and I will have less to worry about if we go alone.”

“Are you planning to kill Sloane?” Coni asked.

Raena looked to Kavanaugh before answering.

“I’m not planning to kill him,” Kavanaugh said. “That’s not to say he doesn’t deserve it.”

“If he’s aged as fast in real life as he has in my dreams,” Raena added, “killing him won’t be necessary.”

Just in case, though, Raena came to the meeting armed. She was glad to have Kavanaugh to watch her back.

Stinger in her hand, she stepped warily though the apartment’s door. The room made her think of the featureless designer-furnished hidey-hole where she and Gavin lived on Brunzell. As it had there, all the furniture here came in a spectrum of shades of dirt, while the walls were an inoffensive tan. No one who had decorated this room ever intended to spend time in it.

The room was unoccupied except for a figure lying on an oversized leather couch. A chocolate brown blanket swathed it from chin to feet. She didn’t recognize its shriveled monkey face.

It stuck a withered claw out from under the blanket. “You came,” it croaked.

“Gavin?” She said it like she wasn’t sure, but she was. It was all true. He had been killing himself with the Messiah drug. Somehow, to the very last minute, she had hoped he was not. She had hoped she’d been wrong. She slid the Stinger into its holster. Clearly, it was unnecessary.

“Is this another dream?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to see you for so long …”

“This is real, Gavin. I’m really here.”

“Still so pretty,” he said. He closed his watery greenish brown eyes, as if he couldn’t fend sleep off any longer.

“Dammit.” All the rest of her life, Raena had only recognized two states: dead or not a threat. This frail old man fit comfortably into neither category. She turned to Kavanaugh. “Is he too far gone?”

Kavanaugh checked Sloane’s pulse and breathing and listened to his heart. “He’s dying,” Kavanaugh reported, “but not this minute. Soon. If you scare him, his heart’s liable to stop.”

Raena nodded. She knelt beside the sofa on a carpet that looked like fat round worms writhing over each other. It was soft beneath her knees, expensive and welcoming.

She studied Sloane. His skin was so dry that it looked clouded over, paler than paper. Brown splotched his face and scalp, irregular patches that looked like death spreading across his skin. His hair had almost completely vanished. A wiry green vein pulsed sluggishly at his temple.

“Was it worth it?” Raena asked.

Sloane’s eyes fluttered open. He smiled, but what teeth he left had gone shades of yellow and brown like the furniture. “Very worth it,” he echoed. “You’re here.”

“But I hate you for what you’ve been doing to me,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry about that,” he wheezed. “But you already hated me.”

She cut him off. “I left you, Gavin. I didn’t hate you.”

He chose not to argue. “I thought going back into the past would be easy. I’d just tell myself, ‘Leave Kai a few days early,’ or ‘Get your ship fixed before you head for Nizarrh,’ or ‘Don’t take the elevator on the
Arbiter
.’ But it doesn’t work that way. Whenever I caught my own eyes, the timeline would break. I’d get kicked out of the trance before I could say anything.”

“But the first dream, the one where you drugged me on Kai … ?”

“I had to kill myself to get you,” he wheezed. “I didn’t want to do that more than once.”

“Do you know how many times I killed you, Gavin? Shooting you or bashing your skull in or kicking you out the airlock … It was awful to wake up with those images in my mind, even if I hadn’t really done those things.”

“Nothing to feel guilty for, then.” He chuckled, but it broke off into a ragged cough.

Kavanaugh put a glass of water in Raena’s hand. She held it for Gavin to get a sip.

“You were magnificent,” he said. “My avenging angel. I tried going to Thallian’s world ahead of you, killing him before you could get there. Then you arrived in the escape pod with Thallian’s son—and Thallian’s clones didn’t come to the surface to get you because I’d already drowned them all. I’m not sure what happened after that. Maybe the shielding prevented you from contacting the
Veracity
to rescue you. Maybe you banged on the secret panel until the boy let you out. Whatever it was, you were both dead by the time I located you.”

Raena frowned as something not quite a memory flickered through her mind. She remembered waiting, trapped inside the gutted communications console, until she was past thirsty, until she was racked with cramps, until she was starving. Then Jain, under the same stress, broke into the console. She’d had no room to maneuver, no leverage, and no way to escape. He only had to hit her until she couldn’t see any more. She opened his throat with her teeth. They had died covered in each other’s blood, lying in each other’s arms.

Raena shuddered. She had struggled to subscribe to Ariel’s philosophy: life was a game. Ariel believed you could sometimes control the bumpers. Raena had always felt that, while occasionally you might be able to slow your fall, the game was inherently rigged. Gravity always won: eventually you always had to take the drop, plunge down that hole. In the meantime, you slammed around, trying to assume some kind of control over the path of your life.

It was horrible to discover how easy it was for someone who claimed to love you to purposefully crash into you, tilt you out of your true trajectory. And to do it over and over and over again.

Raena hadn’t thought she could feel horror any longer, but she felt it now. How could someone who claimed to love her proceed so cheerfully to warp her life like this?

Because his love, like Thallian’s, was a lust for possession. It didn’t see her as real or autonomous. It didn’t grant her free will, except the will to submit. She was an object in the game, not its subject and certainly not its player. She was the prize to be won, but no one cared what the trophy thought about moving from one shelf to another. Its job was to stand still and settle for the pleasure of being admired.

“How could you do this to me?” she whispered.

“I was trying to rescue you,” Gavin protested. “I knew your life had been absolutely hellish, from the moment it started until the day you set Thallian on fire. I wanted to spare you.”

She sat back on her heels, hands balled into fists on her thighs. She tried to keep in mind what Kavanaugh had said about scaring Sloane to death, but she wanted to hurt him so badly it made her tremble. “Gavin, by what right did you decide my life was hellish?”

“You were orphaned. A slave. And Thallian …”

She interrupted the tirade. “It’s my
life,
Gavin. It made me who I am. I don’t want to have it taken away from me. I wouldn’t want to change any of it. It’s mine. It’s all I have. How fucking dare you?”

“It’s made you the woman I love,” he argued, “but I wanted to save you.”

“It’s made me the woman you can’t have,” she corrected. “You wanted to improve me.”

He gaped at her, then offered her a lopsided grin. She might have fallen for it once, when they were both younger, but now she was too enraged.

“Did you ever win me?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” Gavin said. “I was only aware when the past begins. Once the split occurs, things get blurry.”

“You’re lying,” Raena accused. “You know very well what happens. The Messiah lets you stay in the moment, doesn’t it? But making a change is really hard, which is why the drug is so addictive. You have to keep going back, keep trying to make the change you want to see.”

He shook his head, but didn’t meet her eyes.

“As far as I’ve seen, you mostly got killed,” Raena told him. “I didn’t recognize you. I was paranoid and broken. There was no way I could trust you. So I killed you, over and over and over and over. It was awful, Gavin. It had to stop.”

“Is it too hard to kill someone you love?” he asked.

“You were killing me, chipping away at me like that. That wasn’t hard at all, was it?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”