Authors: K.M. Ruiz
“It can't be helped,” Erik said as hung his robes in the wide closet by the front blast doors. The small bunker city carved below the rubble above was still more lived-in than any other building aboveground. By law, the members of the World Court had to reside in the safety of these underground hallways and homes.
“You say that every time. Pick another excuse.” Sharra glared at him over the rim of her wineglass. Lipstick had transferred a perfect imprint of her mouth to the delicate, clear glass. The color looked like waxy crayon, which meant this was not her first, second, or even third glass of wine.
Erik stepped closer to kiss Sharra on the cheek. He hated the taste of her drunk on his tongue.
“I take it Lillian has already gone to bed?” he said.
“It's midnight. Even the bunker guards have gone to bed except for a skeleton crew.” Sharra spun on her heels and left him where he stood for the mess the dining room had become.
When Erik finally joined her there, he saw that the ribbons and balloons from the party were still up, the half-eaten cake still fresh beneath the preservation cover, and the wrappings from all the presents scattered across the floor. Sharra sat her wineglass down on the table and leaned her weight against the wooden edge of it.
“I asked for one thing from you, Erik,” she said in a low voice. “Just one.”
“I give what I can. You know that.” Erik looked around at the remains of his daughter's birthday party and felt no regret for missing it. He'd had other matters to attend to. “Lillian is young. She'll hardly remember I wasn't here.”
“Lillian is
five,
you son of a bitch,” Sharra snarled. “She'll remember that her father wasn't here, just like you weren't there for the other four.”
“She's a
child,
Sharra.” The irritation in Erik's voice was thick after a sixteen-hour workday. “I have no use for children until they're old enough to understand what it is I expect from them.”
The laughter that came out of his wife's mouth was strained. “The sad thing is that she has use for
you,
Erik. You're her father. At least one day this year, couldn't you have bothered to
act
like it?”
The headache that had been pounding through his skull since before noon became worse at the shrill tone in his wife's voice.
“I'm not doing this,” Erik told her as he walked out of the room. “I've had a full schedule today and it's only going to be worse tomorrow as we run down the clock to the launch. You're impossible to reason with when you're like this.”
He left her standing alone in the dining room, with its bright lights and carefully chosen decorations; with the mess on the floor and the mess in her head and tears of frustration in her eyes. She was forty-three years old with the face and body of someone half her age. She should have been
enough,
Sharra thought as she picked up her wineglass and drained it in two quick, long swallows. She should have been more than enough to hold his attention.
Sharra knew Erik wasn't cheating on her. The press would have a field day with that story, but more than the threat of social humiliation for Erik, she
knew
he didn't have the desire to cheat on her with another woman. She'd paid enough for that promise; she just hadn't seen all those years ago that politics was a bed her husband would wallow in more than her own.
“Mama?”
Sharra set the wineglass down and carefully wiped at her eyes with a fingertip. She blinked back the tears, steadied herself despite the alcohol in her system, and turned to face her daughter, pasting a smile on her face that not even the best politician could have seen through for the lie it truly was.
Lillian was a tiny slip of a thing, with her mother's wide blue eyes and her father's dark hair. Wrapped up in her favorite blanket, with her small feet peeking out beneath her nightgown, she was hopeful in the way that only children could be in this world, before they learned their history. The ones who had their names in the Registry since birth, clean air, clean water, and a future paid in full.
“Sweetie, you should be asleep,” Sharra said as she carefully bent down to pick up her daughter. “It's very late and the party has been over for hours.”
“I thought I heard Daddy.”
The taste of wine on Sharra's tongue turned rancid as she looked into her daughter's hopeful eyes. Cradling her close, Sharra walked on surprisingly steady feet through the hallways of their large living quarters, carrying her daughter back to her bedroom.
“Your daddy's still at work,” Sharra lied. “I'll send him in to say good-night when he finally gets home.”
“Oh.”
The sound of disappointment was thick in the little girl's voice, and Sharra gave her an extrahard hug before tucking Lillian back into the soft bed, which was still warm from when she'd crawled out of it. Sitting beside her, Sharra smoothed her daughter's hair out of her eyes and smiled down at the little girl.
“In the morning, I'll make you breakfast. But only if you go to sleep.”
“Pancakes?” the girl asked, knowing she usually got her way.
“Pancakes. With chocolate chips.” An expensive dish, about as expensive as the wine Sharra drank. Cacao plants were grown in only one SkyFarms cluster somewhere in Brazil. Only the very rich in the Registry had ever tasted chocolate. Lillian had a terrible sweet tooth.
Lillian smiled up at her mother, her small teeth shiny and white in the light coming from the hallway. Then the girl squeezed her eyes shut and flopped on her side, pretend snores coming out of her mouth. Sharra leaned down and pressed a kiss to her daughter's cheek, careful not to breathe. She didn't want her daughter knowing what a drunkard her mother was, not yet at least.
She left Lillian's room, but didn't immediately retreat to the one she shared with Erik. Half a bottle of wine left in the kitchen still needed to be finished. Waste wasn't tolerated, even in the households of registered humans. When she finally made it to the kitchen, she found the wine being poured down the sink.
Sharra jerked to a shaky halt on her high heels as she glared at the man standing in the kitchen. In her drunken state, he could have been a hallucination, but even when she was sober, he'd always been real, even when she wished he weren't.
“
What
are you doing here?” she demanded in a low, frantic voice.
“Erik won't wake up,” Nathan said as he set aside the empty wine bottle and turned to look at her. “He never does when I'm here.”
“You don't
know
that.”
“When I put someone under, they
stay
under, Sharra.” Nathan came over to her and wrapped a hand around her upper arm, guiding her with learned politeness to the nearest seat. Stiff with panic and fear, Sharra followed like a wooden puppet and sank into the chair. “You need something a little stronger than wine.”
A small crystal tumbler appeared on the table in front of her. An eyeblink later and a bottle of aged Scotch joined it. Sharra stared at both as if they were bombs.
She swallowed back bile. “What do you want?”
“I got what I wanted from you years ago.” Nathan smiled at her, the expression as cold as his voice. “Right now, I'm more interested in what Lucas wants from you, if he wants anything at all.”
“I don't speak to your children, Nathan.”
“They're half yours, or don't you remember what it cost to get where you are today?”
Sharra closed her eyes, the wine in her stomach souring into something that wanted to crawl up her throat. A woman of her stature, with a life lived on a mountain of lies. A woman with her name in the Registry, a ring on her finger, and five children to her name. She didn't care about Nathan's. She only cared about her daughter.
That didn't mean her children wouldn't come looking for her, and Nathan knew it.
“He hasn't been here,” Sharra said, opening her eyes. “Why would he? I've nothing he could possibly want.”
They had their father's eyes, but her straight nose, shades of their blond hair. The rest was all a mixture of DNAâhers and Nathan's, and whatever was in her human genome that could make Nathan's psionic attributes breed true. She was useful, and Sharra knew from personal, painful experience that being useful was the only way to survive. Her current positionâher marriage, her
human daughter
âwere the results of producing four embryos for the Serca family. In return, she'd been promised certain survival.
Nathan stared at her from where he stood, tall and perfect in his business suit, with power at his fingertips that Erik could never hope to harness. Psion power that no one ever saw because Nathan was a master at being just human enough that no one looked beyond the veneer.
“I've kept your secrets,” Sharra whispered bitterly.
“Because you can't speak a word of them to anyone. We made sure of that,” Nathan said. “You will notify me if Lucas comes calling. I will know if you don't.”
Sharra reached up instinctively to touch the side of her head, thinking of the bioware net that spanned the entirety of her brain and how fucking
useless
it was in the face of psionic power.
Nathan's smile was slow and dangerous as he noticed the motion of her hand. “When has that ever stopped me before?”
It hadn't, and the systems that monitored the bioware nets for those on or related to those on the World Court never showed psionic interference. Nathan and his Warhounds were amazingly adept at circumventing human technology when they needed to.
“Why don't you simply kill us all?” Sharra asked, the alcohol in her system making her braver than she could ever be sober.
Nathan let his fingers stroke through her hair and Sharra drew in a strangled breath.
“Humans live long enough to be useful” was Nathan's calm answer. “Our one evolutionary shortcoming is your gain.”
“You've lived nearly two lifetimes, Nathan.”
“Yes. Only because I'm killing our children in order to do so, but that isn't a guaranteed cure. If I used my power even half as much as I order them to use theirs, I would be dead. And, oh, you would enjoy that, wouldn't you, Sharra?” Nathan's hands settled heavily on her shoulders, a weight that always pulled at her. “I will live long enough to see Mars Colony. I will live long enough to rule there in the open instead of here behind closed doors. I want that new world, not this mess our ancestors left us. I deserve better than that.”
Sharra closed her eyes and breathed through her nose. “I hope to God you die out in space.”
Nathan laughed, the sound low and amused, his breath blowing over the shell of her ear. “I want the latest launch information by the end of the week.”
“I don't know if I can get that for you.”
“Then I suggest you find a way, as you've done all the times before, or your daughter will grow up without a mother. Or perhaps you will grow old without her.” He squeezed her shoulders. It felt as if he squeezed the life out of her. “When I tampered with Erik's mind all those years ago to make sure he saw you and only you as a possibility for his wife, you knew the cost of that deal.”
She didn't say,
Erik doesn't love me
. She didn't need to. Nathan picked the thought straight out of her mind with an ease that still frightened her, even after all these years of him doing it.
“I never promised you something as useless as love. You got safety. I get information. You have a week.” He pulled his hands away from her and she could breathe again. “Good-bye, Sharra.”
He disappeared in that disturbingly alien way that teleportation encompassed. Sharra shivered, suddenly cold, and hunched over in her seat. Pressing hands that shook to her mouth, she breathed slowly, trying desperately not to get sick there on her kitchen floor.
In the end, she chose Scotch over sleep, Nathan over her husband, because for all the vows they'd spoken at their wedding, she owed Nathan everything and Erik only the appearance of fidelity.
[
TWELVE
]
AUGUST 2379
TARRAGONA, SPAIN
Spain was a wasteland cut apart by deadzones and desertification that had swallowed half the country over a century ago. Madrid was a crater, bombed over and over again during the Border Wars, like most of the major and not so major European cities. Barcelona, east of Tarragona on the Iberian Peninsula, was nothing more than a wide bay of water, the newest coastline addition to the Mediterranean Sea.
Tarragona was half-underground to escape the radiation taint that fallout had spread across the country during the Border Wars. Nuclear winter had lowered the planet's overall temperature, but only for a short time. Warmth eventually returned, and with it, massive, deadly storms that swept periodically over the world: hurricanes and tornadoes, sandstorms and derechos, monsoons and whiteout blizzards. Pollution was still a problem, climate change had altered the region even before society nearly blew itself up, and Tarragona had no city towers for registered humans, only segregated bunkers.
The military-grade shuttle flew just above the low-hanging cloud cover in the night sky, lights off, stealth mode up and running. The engines were barely a hum in Samantha's bones as she peered over the pilot's shoulder through the flight-deck windshields. A hologrid shone in the air between the pilot and the navigator, a ground map with precise details of the maglev train gunning toward Spain's largest surviving city. With a population around 146,000, Tarragona was second only to London in population in Western Europe.
“Speed?” Samantha said.
“Two hundred twenty and decreasing,” the pilot said as he lightly adjusted his grip on the stick. “Your orders?”
Samantha pushed away from the seat. “Descend. We'll take it from here.”