Destiny's Song (The Fixers, book #1: A KarmaCorp Novel) (14 page)

Janelle, lounging on a chair beside me, opened her mouth to answer—and then abruptly shifted, her face letting go of mellow and sliding back into the woman who rode the grasslands on a horse and had very few doubts.

I turned on my chair and ended up eye to eye with Ralph Emerson’s bowl—it was almost as big as his head.

“Good evening, Singer.” He turned slightly to address my companion. “And to the lovely Mistress Brooker.”

She nodded, a friendly smile in place and genuine warmth in her tone. “Ralph. It’s good to see you again. Did you bring any of your imps along?”

He grinned. “Just one—Malia is with me this time.”

“Ah.”

A world of meaning packed into one syllable. I watched silently, fascinated by the ripples as two parts of my temporary world collided. Tameka had hinted that there were other sources of power here on Bromelain III. Judging from what I saw in front of me, some of them had the name Emerson attached.

However, once again, all parties involved seemed pretty thoroughly mired in mutual respect. Whatever the Anthro models said, I just couldn’t see this planet imploding. Too many stable, capable, independent types.

Ralph turned as the noise from the crowd behind him dimmed considerably. “I believe the evening’s entertainment is about to get underway.”

Somehow, in my bacon-and-apple stupor, I’d managed to forget why we were here. I followed his gaze, trepidation rising.

Evgenia Lovatt had stepped into a bright spotlight on the ethereal, starry stage, a state-of-the-art acoustic microphone in her hand. “Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming on such short notice to help us share our love of music and song with our honored guest.” She gestured my direction, clearly well aware of which shadows I inhabited. “We have a KarmaCorp Singer in our midst, as I’m sure you’ve all heard, come to assist us with our bid to join the Federation.”

That was an audacious spin. Light murmuring in the audience seemed to suggest that I wasn’t the only one who had noticed. KarmaCorp didn’t align itself with political interests, especially those of a minor outpost colony. Evgenia might have named the reason I’d been requested, but it was highly unlikely that it was the reason I’d been sent. The StarReaders had seen something else—something that mattered enough to have landed in an Ears Only file. I would likely never know what, and neither would anyone in this ballroom.

Unlike them, I had to believe it was something that mattered.

I slid off my chair and stepped out of the shadows—Fixers normally hid in dark corners just fine, but my digger-chick instincts didn’t think that was the answer right now.

“Normally, we let our honored guests sit quietly.” Evgenia paused and looked around the ballroom, gauging interest. Holding attention. “But I have it on good authority that we have a lovely new voice in our midst, and I was hoping she could be persuaded to share a song or two.” She held out a hand in my direction. “Singer, if you would be so kind as to indulge us?”

I stood pinned to the ground, stupefied. I was a KarmaCorp Fixer, not an entertainer.

Ralph chuckled quietly behind me. “What did you do to get under her skin?”

It wasn’t Evgenia I was concerned about—whatever the glint in her eyes might be saying, she wasn’t the architect of this evening. “I don’t sing in public.”

“That’s one possible answer.” His voice was full of wry amusement. “Perhaps not the most politically expedient one, however.”

Cart him to hell and back for being right. I’d created enough of a mess on Bromelain III without refusing a direct and very public request from the royal matriarch, even if she was engaging in the body-slam version of diplomatic dancing. Or her son was. I swallowed a goodly chunk of digger-rock attitude and tried to sort out an answer that would keep the imprint of Yesenia Mayes’ boots off my behind.

Janelle had stepped up beside me, lips quirking, but saying nothing. A friend who let her friends fight their own battles—or fed them happily enough to a certain wolf.

I fingered my gold headphones, thinking fast. And then I found my tunnel entrance and looked back at Ralph Emerson. “Do you happen to know where Malia is?”

His eyebrows shot up a little. “Yes.”

I grinned and let the chick from the digger rock loose. “Good. Grab her and meet me at the microphone, will you? The three of us sounded pretty good together earlier.”

His eyebrows shot up a whole lot farther—and then his eyes filled with amused respect. “Indeed we did.”

I spun on the heel of my miner boots and headed for the stage. One fight, or whatever the hell this was, engaged. I hoped the man who had started it was paying attention.

Evgenia watched my approach and handed over the microphone without comment. I ignored her utterly and turned to face the audience. “Hello, everyone. This isn’t usually part of my job description, so I’ve asked a couple of the people here tonight to help me out.”

The audience started craning their necks to see. Beside me, Evgenia’s spine got noticeably more rigid. I kept ignoring her, pretty sure she was no match for Malia Emerson.

Ralph arrived at the edge of the stage first and stepped back to let his granddaughter ascend the stairs ahead of him. Murmurs started in the crowd—clearly at least some of the attendees knew who she was. I flashed her a grin and then crouched down as she arrived at my side, covering the mike. “Will you sing with me exactly like we did this afternoon?” I glanced over at the man just arriving. “Your granddad can take the lead this time, and we’ll both play with the melody he’s singing.”

“No pressure,” said Ralph dryly.

I wasn’t worried—I’d heard him sing. “Stage fright?”

He chuckled. “No.”

I handed him the microphone. Malia and I wouldn’t need one—Talent would magnify whatever vocal chords couldn’t. He cleared his throat and looked out at the hushed crowd. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Ralph Emerson, and you likely know my family from over north way. I’ll be the guy holding the coats while these two lovely ladies wow you with their voices.”

People laughed, and the watchful energy subsided. Ralph, taking the pressure off all of us with an ease that suggested long experience in front of fractious crowds. He looked down at his granddaughter and winked. “If I sing off key, kick my ankles gently, okay?”

Malia grinned. “Kicking’s not nice manners.”

The audience laughed, and those who seemed to know the child laughed loudest.

My nonexistent entertainer skills were nicely being made redundant.

Ralph nodded at me and picked up a melody line that I quickly recognized as the one Malia and I had been playing with at the end of her testing. I was impressed—he had it nailed, right down to the trills and tricky harmonics.

His granddaughter, not shy at all, was already joining in with some high overnotes. Not a lot of volume yet, and she hadn’t let her Talent loose.

I listened to the two of them, enjoying the interplay—and then I remembered that she was an untrained seven-year-old and got my shit together. Somebody needed to drive this bus. I layered in carefully underneath her high descant. Supporting the audible tones, and encouraging her subsonics into gear.

She looked over at me and grinned as her heaping Talent came out to play.

I put up a wave perimeter to hold us steady and tried not to laugh. It was like trying to contain an overly eager puppy—I was getting my metaphorical face licked. Malia’s first-year trainers were going to have their hands full.

The kid soared up an octave and then swooped down again, puppy in full flight.

The acoustics were incredibly good. This ballroom might look like a fancy dance hall, but there was no way voices sounded this good in here by accident. Someone had designed this place to be sung in.

Ralph and Malia had found their groove now, young and old singing a beautiful duet sandwich around my quiet harmonies in the middle.

Once upon a time, I’d have wanted to be the flash. Tonight, it was perfectly fine to be the most boring person on the stage. I set my hands on the headphones around my neck and sang backup to a seven-year-old and her granddad.

And then Ralph smiled, took a couple of steps back, and stopped singing.

Malia and I both turned to look at him, confused.

He gestured at the two of us, palms up.

I sent him the nastiest glare I dared with a spotlight shining on our faces. Troublemaker.

The look he sent me back was utterly bland.

His granddaughter grinned, turned back toward the audience, and slid her voice up a run that should have had glass breaking except for the sure, sheer beauty of her notes. Not an exuberant puppy anymore. Stardust and auditory magic.

I did my job and swept up behind her, the steady wind under soaring wings that didn’t yet know what it was to need landing gear.

When we finished, the audience erupted. I took two steps back to stand beside Ralph and let a gangly girl with shining eyes take her bows. I needed a moment to gather the pieces of my soul back from the heavens.

This afternoon, Malia had reminded me of why I worked. Tonight, she reminded me of why I Sang.

A slender man with dancing eyes walked up the steps and took the microphone, ruffling Malia’s hair. “You’re a hard act to follow, kiddo.”

She laughed and blew him a kiss. “Are you going to sing the one about the silly cow who jumped over the moon?”

“Maybe. You going to sing with me?”

She shook her head earnestly. “Not this time—I need to go eat. My tummy is rumbly.”

We walked off the stage to the opening bars of a nursery-rhyme medley that was clever, irreverent, and clearly well known to the listening crowd. The musicians in the corner were getting in on the action, adding their sounds as harmony, counterpoint, and the occasional barnyard animal.

I turned to listen, oddly captivated.

By the time the fifth or sixth person got up to sing, the trend was clear. The range of genres was vast—some goofy, some serious, some folk songs and some tending toward the operatic. But every last person who got up behind the mike had a good handle on how to work notes with their voice. And judging from the loose line forming stage left, there were a whole lot more very competent singers to come.

I stopped trying to analyze anything.

My headphones and I had landed in a nice spot in the standing throngs just left of center stage. I stomped my boots to the beat when there was one, shimmied my hips when there wasn’t, and let myself sink into the joy of really good music. I had no idea why there was this depth and breadth of skilled voices on a backwater planet, why it had taken me a week to find out, or why Devan Lovatt had suddenly called them forth.

But it was apples and bacon for my soul.

M
idnight
. So the matriarch of the evening had announced, right before the last singer ascended to the stage.

The man behind the microphone kept his hands still on the eight-stringed instrument that looked like a second cousin to a guitar, and sang the opening notes a cappella. Quiet, haunting, and glorious.

I sighed, my heart stuffed full of music and all the things it called up in me. I wasn’t surprised by the skill anymore. Someone on BroThree gave damn fine singing lessons—and Devan Lovatt had absolutely been a student. He had a gorgeous voice, the kind that spoke of dedicated training beneath the carefree ease. He landed like melted butter on the notes, bending them with a grace that took a well-trained diaphragm, a good ear, and some serious practice.

More importantly for this night, however, he clearly knew how to play an audience. They’d hushed the moment he’d begun to sing, and now, as he tugged at them with the tight runs that headed into the body of the old ballad, they started to lean in. All eyes on the bard.

Singing to them all. Singing only to me.

Calling to my jagged heart. Sending beauty and light into the awful, empty space between what I had to do and what I wanted.

It was a song I knew. An old folk tune, renditions of which existed all over the galaxy. One of those songs that sounded simple, and could be sung that way. Devan wasn’t singing the simple version. His voice added hints of what, on another night, might be the flute or lute or electric guitar, the subtle embellishments that make a simple melody lush and poetic and captivating. His fingers added soft accompaniment on the strings.

Singing to them all. Singing only to me.

I cursed my Song as it started to hum the undertones that would mesh with man and instrument. I wasn’t Devan Lovatt’s backup.

His eyes found me—and asked me to be something entirely different. A man who had found the seed inside himself. A man trying to figure out what to do with it and what it meant.

My Talent oozed partway out some tiny crack in my Fixer armor. Begging. For just one song, I needed to be with him, even if no one else would ever hear it.

And then I saw Malia, two rows ahead and turned to face me, eyes glued to mine. Feeling the disturbances in the force.

Someone else would always hear.

So I kept my Talent bound and chained, and listened instead. Reached, heart yearning and soul cracking, to gather up a picture. Something to carry away when I had to go.

Devan leaned into the lines of the chorus now, a story of love and loss and the fires of home that tightened my throat, blurred my eyes, and squeezed my lungs until oxygen was a long-lost memory.

And still I listened, drinking in every last note. I would not Sing—but I would hear his Song.

It began with the same story I’d heard at his stream, one of a boy and the planet he loved, of the waters and grasses that had kept him a healthy child and grown him into a rooted and steady man. But this time, I let myself listen to the rest. The quiet notes of discontent, rising up underneath the main melody line. Not much—the remnants of teenage rebellion against the ties that bound him. A substantial dose of humor, a man who could look at most anything in his life and see the lopsided bits. A man who knew not to take himself too seriously.

I sighed. Even now, I was avoiding.

I breathed once again into the adult, responsible life I had chosen—and then I held my head high, locked my eyes with his, and let myself open to the notes that would hurt most. The music of the embryonic seed of future love, planted in the rich soils of his vibrant soul.

The one he had found and was beginning to water.

My heart soaked in the singing of the seed and the man, drinking deeply of the promise that lived there—the hope and the achingly fragile thread of what might be.

I reached for the not-so-tiny seed, every cell of my body vibrating. I would not Sing to it. Couldn’t. But just for a moment, I held it and treasured what it was.

And in the most tucked-away DNA of that seed, I heard something I hadn’t known. Deep inside Devan Lovatt, something hurt—and something healed.

My Talent yanked its way out of prison, seeking. Needing to know. I reached—for the scars, and for the unfurling shoots rooted in rich, deep soil that seed could become. For one, aching heartbeat, I touched the pure, glorious young green of the new leaves and their song of opening, their story of why he hadn’t opened to love before. A wound so carefully and expertly disguised, I hadn’t been able to see it.

My mission wasn’t to Sing two stubborn hearts toward each other. It was to
open
them. It had taken only the words of a friend to encourage Janelle to dream a little. But Devan needed something different—and I had needed to see this deep into his heart to know what it was.

He was a man who had grown up in a world full of enormous gravitational forces. His parents, the Inheritor model of governance that had begun shaping his destiny well before he was born, a planet full of people who expected him to lead them one day and to earn the right to do it.

He’d survived by slithering loose. By dangling his toes in a stream where no molecule of water could ever be pinned down for more than an instant. By flying a ship tuned to escape gravity with the lightest touch of his hands. By singing to an audience, but never singing to just one.

By loving wide, but never deep.

I looked into the eyes of the man still standing alone on a stage at midnight and singing—and understood. Janelle would never have let him love her just a little, and he would have always known that. Me, I’d taken him by surprise. And because I had, that door in his heart—the one that could let in monumental, gravitational-force-sized love—had opened, just a crack.

He had opened it for me.

My Song swirled in my throat, clogging with the aching, terrible beauty of what I had to do next. I could feel the greater good. Not KarmaCorp’s good, not my good. The calling of karmic rightness. The world would be immeasurably better with a Devan Lovatt in it who was open to loving deeply.

He had opened that door for me. Now I needed to ask him to keep it open—even though I would never walk through it.

My mission wasn’t to get him to say yes. It was for me to say no, and to do it with enough clarity and grace that a part of Devan which he’d put away long ago could finally get the oxygen it needed to come to life.

He would do it for himself eventually—I could believe no less of the amazing man he was. But I could help it happen now. And I would do it with all the fierce love and dignity that a demon child from a digger rock could give. It would be a gift, my first and last, to a man I would never forget.

Because he was not the only one opening this night.

I called up all the skill that was mine to possess, shaping the notes in my head and my ribs, the ones that would ask his heart to stay open. I could feel my chakras snapping into alignment.

This would work. He would listen because I was the best damn Singer in this quadrant. And he would listen because the notes were mine.

I didn’t bother with discretion or nuance or any semblance of the normal careful silencers a Singer used in her work. I hadn’t landed on Bromelain III quietly, and it seemed I wasn’t going to leave that way either. Every person here tonight would know what I did.

But only one would know why.

I let my notes go, audible range and subsonic both, a cacophony of power and sound, heat and pleading and shattering softness.

I saw Devan’s jaw drop in abject shock as the first vibrations hit.

I let the shattering softness land first—I would do this as gently as I could. For a few shimmering notes, I stood in the open doorway of the heart of the man I loved and helped him heal.

And then I gathered the notes that would hold it open while I walked away.

On stage, the man of pebble and stream and laughing flight took one step toward me. And another.

My soul keened—but I didn’t have much longer. I gathered every shred of courage and conviction I had left and pushed it at the man I had to leave.

And felt the wild, fierce blast of another Talent landing, locking my Song up tight and shielding the hell out if its intended target. I spun around, shocked to the core. Fixers didn’t fight each other. Ever.

Tameka stood behind me, her silk robes spread, bare feet planted, toes curling into the floor.

I gathered up the concentration she’d demolished, reaching for the fraying echoes of my Song for Devan.

“No, child.” The old Dancer held the notes out of my reach with a mere flick of her wrists. “That’s not the way.”

Like hell it wasn’t. “It’s the only way.”

“Find another choice.” She was having to work harder now, and we both knew it. “This one goes through me.”

I Sang long, sure notes—ones that rang with mission and focus and higher calling. “You’re a Fixer, Tameka. We don’t do this.”

She snorted, even as beads of sweat started to pop out on her face. “You’re not just a Fixer, Lakisha Drinkwater—you’re a human being. Trust your Talent, your brain, your heart, your digger-rock common sense.”

I was. I gathered my notes to my chest, shaping them into something that would blow through the Dancer’s net.

“Don’t.” Tameka held up both hands, the universal sign of surrender from a woman suddenly shaky on her feet. She met my gaze with eyes that weren’t shaky at all. “You can do it, we both know that. But I don’t think you want to.”

Devan stepped up to her shoulder, crackling with energy entirely his own.

I seized every gram of Talent I had left. Looked away from the eyes of a woman who had chosen to live out the rest of her days as a blade of grass under a magic, dancing sky—and into the furious, pleading eyes of the man I loved.

And then, tortured, sad, and cracked—I let my Song go.

I couldn’t do it. To her, or to him, or to what was left of my ravaged heart.

But there was another way to finish this that wouldn’t require any Talent at all—and I’d even worn the right footwear. It was time to use my boots for the purpose they’d been designed for.

I fled.