All four of them ended up in a heap, like the tangle of silk thread she’d always ended up with when she’d tried to learn to weave. Mercury was in her arms and Lo and Carn were there, too. For a moment she felt the sort of connection she’d always imagined she’d one day have with her father and his crew. She’d only known these men a few weeks, but she already felt a part of them. It had to be an illusion, a mix of adrenalin and euphoria. Like that heap of thread, one good shake and it would fall apart.
Alone, Mercury crouched in the wider part of the cavern while the others slept around the bend. He looked up to the gouge in the dark roof and the steady streams of muddy water trickling down. At least the chunks of muck and mud had stopped sliding down on top of the mound below. When he’d been lying beneath that pile of muck he’d had no fear of dying. He’d known they’d dig free, but Samantha hadn’t known that. She’d thrown herself into action to save them. He hadn’t been surprised when her hand brushed against his. Some part of him had known. Known she would offer aid. Known he could rely on her. She’d proven it time and time again. And that was something he’d never had from anyone except his brothers. The feeling left him uneasy.
“Can’t sleep, brother?” Lo hunched nearby. That Mercury hadn’t heard him approach said a lot about how unsettled he was.
Mercury shifted his gaze to the sky beyond the gap overhead. “I want to get moving as soon as the rain stops.”
“It’ll be slow-going with Carn’s injured knee.”
Mercury made a noncommittal noise in answer. He didn’t want to think of Carn’s injury or the competent way Samantha had diagnosed and treated the swelling. She was so damn competent at everything. They had relied on her for so much. Even here in this place she called Wilderness. “Samantha didn’t take water or food when we ate.”
Lo shifted his weight. “You think she can’t hold it down?”
“I think she fears she can’t. She gets worse every hour.”
“She didn’t want you to know.” Lo tilted his head, ears alert. “Why?”
“She doesn’t want me to feel guilty for pushing forward when turning back could end her suffering.” Her attempt to ease his guilt was wasted effort. He hated the choice he’d had to make.
“Perhaps,” said Lo. “Or perhaps she does all to gain your trust for her own reasons.”
“Reasons? What reason could she have for any of this?” He held out his hands to indicate the obvious lack of comforts. “What profit could there be for her that would be worth this risk?”
“I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
Anger became a choker tightening around Mercury’s throat. “Do you really think she’s capable of such a plot when she is more apt to jump head first into every dangerous situation?”
No. Mercury didn’t believe the woman who recklessly tackled a guard to spare him pain or fought her fear to climb into a hole to save his brother could be calculating enough to plan their downfall. But in moments of too much thought, he also questioned why she would do so much for them. Could a woman with so much skill and knowledge and passion truly care for them or was it simply in her nature to aid those in need? He hated the insecurity that made him need to be special to her. To know that she saw them as more than animals to be set free. Worthy only of her pity.
He hated that tiny seed of doubt, but the doubt in Lo’s eyes lurked as large as the mountains of Wilderness. “What did she do to hurt you so deeply?”
The shutter that closed off Lo’s emotions fell so fast Mercury knew Lo understood they were no longer talking about Samantha.
“You know what happened.” The pain hidden in the slow cadence of his words extinguished Mercury’s anger.
“No,” he said. “I only know she betrayed you. I don’t know how?”
Lo’s face tightened, drawing attention to his powerful jaw. “Now? You ask me this now?”
“I think it’s time, brother.”
“Grah.” Lo shook.
He’d been bottling up his hurt so long he must need to howl, to run, to fight, but none of those options were available to him. When he spoke it was through a clenched jaw.
“It had been months since she’d asked for me at the Ladies’ Wall. She’d been bribing one of the guards to give us time in one of the training rooms. She no longer needed the drugs to have me panting after her like a prize.” Lo’s eyes glazed over as if he were back there again, lost in the memory. “I was chained to the wall when I saw her. Owens was there and another human female. A patron I didn’t recognize. Rachel brought them there to watch, to prove to them I’d fuck her without the drugs, without the chains to keep me from hurting her. They’d still chained me, but as she explained her plan she freed one of my hands.”
Mercury was tempted to stop the flow of words. In truth, he didn’t need to hear the details, but he knew Lo needed to give them. To get them out of his heart where they’d been lodged for months. “Her plan?”
“If I performed,” he spat the words, “as she’d promised. Owens would send me to the pleasure suites for three months. Rachel would get a share of the premium they’d earn from it.”
Fully trained gladiators were never sent to the pleasure suites where their more submissive counterparts were given to patrons for sex. The submissives had no will to fight, but once trained, the gladiators were too dangerous to leave unattended with a patron—even chained down.
Mercury waited. The worst still hid behind Lo’s shuttered expression.
“She said it would be easy work for me. That all I had to do was lay back and get fucked by the grandest patrons on the planet. She said…” He swallowed as if the next words had formed a jagged rock to cut at his throat as he forced them out. “She said she promised they’d all have skin as soft as a whisper. They all laughed when she said it. Owens, the guard, even the female. It was a thing I’d said to her when we were alone together and she threw it back at me for all to hear. I wanted to kill her.”
“Instead you marked her.”
His eyes shifted away “Mercury—”
“I’m glad you fought your instinct. Not because she didn’t deserve a slow and painful death.”
“Merc—”
“Because if you’d given in, they would have taken your life. If I had a chance I’d kill the bitch myself.”
“Mercury.”
Finally, Mercury understood Lo’s warning. He turned to see Samantha standing at the bend in the cavern. She stepped forward to stand between him and Lo, but a full pace back from them both. She smiled…and it broke his heart. The smile was brittle. Her pale limps trembled.
“Samantha?” How long had she been there? Long enough at least to hear his blood lust.
She didn’t meet his eyes when she spoke. “They’re the same people who terraformed the planet.”
His mind couldn’t follow whatever leap she’d made to move the conversation beyond betrayal, humiliation, and killing. Was it mercy or disgust that led her to change the subject? “Who?”
“The skeletons. They must have been the same people who terraformed the planet.” She lifted her hand to reveal a thin disk of metal cupped in her palm. “I found this with one of the more intact skeletons.” She traced the disk with the tips of her fingers. “I saw this symbol on one of the terraforming platforms.”
He wanted to snatch her fingers away and draw them to his lips. He wanted her in his arms. He wanted to make her forget the ugliness of his past, his and his brothers, a past she couldn’t—shouldn’t know.
She might not belong in his world, nor him in hers, but he wanted to remind her of how well their bodies fit. If nothing else, at least they had that.
He held out his hand to accept the disk she offered and set his mind to her words. “How do you think they died?” Had these people been trapped by a landslide or did their customs call for a single burial site for all?
Lo stood quiet and grim as Mercury watched her flip the disk over in his palm. A scorch mark marred the metal.
“This mark was made by a plasma weapon,” said Samantha. “Someone killed them.”
Planet G-45987
Earth Alliance Beta Sector - Gollerra Border
2210.162
There’d been no more rain since they’d crawled out of the ravine that morning, but the air seemed thick and heavy with moisture. Mercury held Samantha as the mid-day sun beat down on them. Her belly heaved beneath his hand as her stomach tried again to rid itself of food and water that wasn’t there. He’d carried her all day while Lo had drug the hastily made litter that carried Carn, so Mercury knew she hadn’t even attempted to drink water.
“Stars.” Samantha pushed back to stand upright and attempted a tired grin. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this bad. I must look like death.”
Mercury brushed the backs of his knuckles across her cheekbone. “You look as beautiful as ever—just a little more green.”
She started to laugh and then she was bending forward again with her belly heaving uncontrollably. He’d been teasing her about the green, but he would welcome the sight of any of her colorful nature, even green. Her complexion had actually grown dull and colorless.
She’d been small and slight from the beginning and he knew human bones were less dense than those of the Arena Dogs, but her personality had a way of convincing everyone around her that she was tougher than those facts allowed. She’d charged Resler, fought with Drake. Now that he held her, the slender ridge of her ribs beneath his fingers, it seemed impossible she could have done those things. He cringed at the memory of how he’d fucked her like an animal. He’d tried to be gentle, but he never should have touched her. He shouldn’t have, but he had and he wanted to do it again. First, he needed to stop this damn signal that was making her and Carn sick.
He helped her sit up again and wiped perspiration from her brow. “We need to keep traveling,
Courra
.”
She nodded. “I know.” Her gaze drifted to where Carn lay unconscious. “The last time he came around he seemed delirious. That’s seriously not good.”
“No,” Mercury agreed, aware that her condition was deteriorating faster than Carn’s had. Another day and she’d be as bad or worse.
She reached out and rested her delicate hand on his arms. It was the first time she’d reached out to touch him since that awful moment in the cavern when he’d confessed his desire to kill Rachel. They’d both pretended like it hadn’t happened, but he’d been waiting for her to push him away every since. She’d let him carry her, but there had been nothing offered—until this.
“Lucky for us that you and Lo are okay,” she said. “We’d be in real trouble if we were all feeling like Carn.”
“True.” He turned to let her wrap herself around his back. By the time he got to his feet she’d already leaned forward to lay her cheek against his shoulder.
He gave Lo the signal to move and watched as he lifted the handles of Carn’s litter then fell in behind them. As they slogged forward, the next rocky rise loomed larger and larger. When they reached the end of the plateau, dread became a stone in his belly. He’d have to leave Carn and Lo behind. Trying to get the litter up the rocky, slope didn’t make sense.
Lo must have come to the same conclusion. He dragged Carn over to a small cluster of rocks jutting up. “This is a good defensible spot.”
“We don’t know if there’s water nearby.”
Lo’s ears twitched. “I’m hoping you won’t be gone so long we’ll need to find it, but I think there’s water near. I hear a noise like the creek we followed some days back, only bigger.”
Mercury knew if Lo heard it then it was there. “I hope you’re right on both counts. We’ll return here as soon as we can. And I know Samantha will want a bath.” Thoughts of their last bath together heated his blood.
Lo slapped a claw-tipped hand over Mercury’s heart. “Return soon, my brother.”
Mercury mirrored the movement. “Be safe and well.”
Mercury decided to pick up his pace when he started up the rise. He wouldn’t be able to maintain it long, but instinct told him they weren’t far from the source of the pulse. The increase in pace made for a rougher gait. Samantha woke, tightening her clasp around his shoulders.
A sudden jerk rippled through her body at his back. “Where are Lo and Carn.”
“Not far. At the base of this slope.”
She turned as if to look behind them and he had to adjust for the shift of her weight. He bent his knees and pushed through to leap up the next outcropping. This time when she clung tighter she pressed her body tightly against his. The pleasure in that served as a welcome distraction from the ache in his muscles and the growing pain in his head.
He leapt again, reaching for what appeared to be a ledge. He gripped the rock edge tightly and strained to use nothing more than upper body strength to pull them up. At his back, Samantha didn’t so much as breathe until he swung his legs onto the ledge.
“Show off,” she teased with a playful squeeze of his biceps.
Despite his pain, joy soared within him at the reminder of her unflagging spirit. He started to tease her back, but the words froze in his throat at the sight in front of him.
The ledge cut further into the slope than he’d anticipated. It looked almost as if something had sliced away a section of the incline. The ledge reached about ten meters into the slope ending in an unnaturally smooth cliff. Hand and foot holds had been carved in the rock making a ladder at one side. Symbols had been painted in a deep blue color all along the cliff. At the center of the ledge a two meter tall spike had been driven into the rock. Atop it sat a multi-sided object with more symbols etched into its surface.
“Samantha?”
“I see it. Help me.”
She pulled free of him as he set her on her feet. On shaky legs she stumbled over to the strange object.
“What is it?” He caught himself whispering as if the owners of the object would appear out of the rock face.
“A pentagonal cupola.”
“That sounds as if you’re speaking another language.”
She grinned through her pain. “That language would be geometry. It’s a twelve sided shape. I haven’t seen one outside a three dimensional navigation chart, and that only back in my time cramming for the pilot’s exam. I think it’s also our transmitter. And who knows what else.”