Destiny's Song (The Fixers, book #1: A KarmaCorp Novel) (16 page)

S
ome things didn’t change just
because you’ve traveled a thousand lightyears. I skulked down the walkways of KarmaCorp’s headquarters on Stardust Prime, sticking to shadows as I made my way to the boss lady’s office.

I’d come on the double from the spaceport, hoping to circumvent some of Yesenia’s wrath by arriving before she expected me. Probably a lost cause—I’d been in transit for a week. Plenty long enough for her to have worked up a galaxy-sized storm, full of lots of space shrapnel.

All the better to shred me with. Yesenia didn’t tolerate failure.

“Kish!”

Tee’s hand reaching out from a dark doorway frayed what few nerves I had left. She yanked me into a storage closet, slammed the door behind us, and grabbed at my shoulders, hands frantic. “What the hell happened out there?”

Nothing I dared tell her. “I got back from assignment, I need to report in. End of story.”

“Right.” She scanned me up and down, one Grower in high dudgeon. “Tameka sent me a message. She said your heart would likely need tending.”

That broke every kind of rule there was. “Gods, Tee—stay out of this, okay?” The last thing on earth I needed right now was the whole Lightbody family trying to come to my aid.

“Like hell.” My best friend took two steps back and propped herself on the edge of a box, arms folded and eyes fierce. “Talk. Tameka wouldn’t. I tried.”

I knew just how hard Tee could try when she wanted to. I fingered the old Fixer’s handwritten note, still in my pocket. It was much crumpled now from countless readings en route.

Trying to remember why I’d done this.

Because somewhere in the first leg of my flight home, I’d realized what I should have known before I’d ever invited Devan Lovatt to come visit—Yesenia could flick her fingers and keep him from setting foot within lightyears of me ever again. I’d been high on some heady combination of love, insanity, and bacon fumes if I’d managed to forget that for even an instant.

I looked over at my roommate, still shooting daggers from her perch on a box of supplies. “I don’t even know where to start. How much do you know?”

“Nothing.” She pursed her lips grimly. “There’s not even a whisper circulating here, and Tameka wouldn’t tell me shit.”

Tameka had done plenty just by contacting Tee in the first place—but it was far more astonishing that the rumor mill of Stardust Prime had nothing. “How can there not be whispers?”

“I don’t know.” She looked even grimmer now. “I don’t like it, Kish.”

She wasn’t the only one. There were always rumors. Always, and Tee would have her hands in the thick of them. If there weren’t, someone was doing a very thorough job of scrubbing them—and as far as I knew, only one person had that kind of reach.

Yesenia didn’t want anyone to know I’d failed.

That scared me enough to get me talking. “I was supposed to make the Inheritor Elect of Bromelain III fall in love with one of his neighbors.” I gulped. “I kind of fell in love with him instead.”

Tee’s face was a conundrum of empathy, fascination, and horror. “Oh, hell. Oh, no.”

“It gets worse. He kind of fell in love with me too.” Or he’d been well on his way, anyhow.

Horror won. Tee yanked me down onto a box beside her, her hands wrapping my face like she could protect me if she just held on tight enough. “What the hell did you do?”

“I left.” I looked straight into her eyes and wondered if it was the last time I’d get to see them. Fixers in exile didn’t get passes to Stardust Prime. “But first, I Sang for him. And I invited him to come visit me.”

She turned sheet white. We both knew how bad this was. Three hundred years of history made very clear what happened when we didn’t follow orders. There would be a calm, organized, very convincing cleanup of any nasty ripples—KarmaCorp didn’t leave galactic messes. And I would spend the rest of my life chained to a pile of paperwork somewhere that would make Bromelain III look like the cradle of civilization.

Death by irrelevance.

And that’s if I was lucky. The StarReaders would measure the consequences of my actions—they likely already had. And then KarmaCorp would do what it needed to do.

None of which would change what happened in Yesenia’s office. I hadn’t followed orders. Even if I hadn’t changed the destiny of the universe one hair, she was still going to want my head.

Because I had taken the risk. Because I had dared to create ripples of my own making.

Tee was watching me carefully. “Tameka said she tried to stop you.”

I hoped like hell she hadn’t put that in her report to Yesenia. The choice had been mine, and the head rolling should be mine, too.

My roommate’s voice had quieted. “She said you let her.”

I looked down at the scratched floor under my feet. I couldn’t lie to Tee—she knew exactly how much Talent I had and what I could do with it. “I shouldn’t have.”

“Hmm.” She sounded almost bemused. “Do you know why you did?”

Because I hadn’t wanted to see a proud legend reduced to gelatin. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her. “He must be an amazing man.”

He was. But he wasn’t the only reason my head was about to roll.

Because on day six in the tin can, I’d finally figured something else out. As much as my instincts for self-preservation wanted to believe otherwise, this assignment had changed me in ways that had nothing to do with Devan Lovatt.

Diggers do what they’re told or they die. Fixers do what they’re told—or someone else dies. Or at least that’s what I’d convinced myself over the last fifteen years, with the thorough cooperation of the corporation I worked for. I had chosen to become a loyal cog, to imprint KarmaCorp’s mission on my soul.

I had chosen to rebel in small ways—and bow down in large ones.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. I’d crashed into the side of a mining asteroid before I was a week old, then been yanked out of that life because of something I could do with the notes of a song. My life was solid evidence that destiny happened to me—I didn’t create it.

Until one small moment on a backwater planet when a different wind had blown at my back.

A moment that, no matter how much my boots were shaking now, I couldn’t bring myself to regret. When I’d landed on Bromelain III, I’d believed that what I
did
mattered. Now I believed that
I
mattered. I was still flotsam—but I was a different kind of flotsam.

Or at least I would be until Yesenia was done with me.

I reached for my roommate’s hands. “Keep your family out of this, okay?” The Lightbodys were a force to be reckoned with on this planet, but they were no match for Yesenia on a tear.

“Not going to happen,” said Tee softly.

It damn well was, even if I had to throw myself out of a space chute to make sure of it. “Delay them at least.” That would buy me some time to sacrifice whatever body parts Yesenia might take as compensation for the shit storm I’d landed on her desk.

“Go.” She pulled open the storage room door and laid a hand on my arm as I moved to leave. “Iggy and Raven will be waiting at our place.”

Friends at my back. “Circling the wagons, huh?”

“Yeah.” She slid her hand down my arm and squeezed my fingers again. “Something like that.”

I kept my face as calm as I could, tossing her the bag I’d been carrying as I stood to go. “Apples and butter. I’ll be there in time for the pie.”

I didn’t meet her eyes. I knew neither of us believed it.

B
ean looked
up from her desk as I walked into the outer rings of Yesenia’s sanctum. “Hey, Kish—how was the trip?”

I squinted at her innocent face. “You haven’t heard?” All gossip on Stardust Prime routed itself through this office before it went anywhere else. Tee hadn’t been kidding.

Her eyebrows shot up. “No. What am I supposed to have heard?”

She’d find out soon enough. I nodded at the boss lady’s door. “Has her head started steaming yet?”

Bean’s eyes slammed shut and then opened again very slowly, as if I might be some kind of hallucination. “No. She just ordered waffles and a fruit bowl for breakfast. What the heck is going on?”

I stared, suspicious and confused. Yesenia’s eating habits were the stuff of Fixer legend—the woman’s food consumption totally tracked her moods. Waffles and a fruit bowl sure didn’t sound like hurricane-level fury. “Seriously? She’s not in there muttering inventive death threats under her breath?”

“I don’t think so.” Bean shook her head slowly. “She was here early, chatty when we ran through her morning agenda, and she’s got some pretty Ethulian flute music playing, or she did last time I was in there.”

Yesenia’s music consumption also tracked her moods. “No Rachmaninoff?” Even a second-year trainee knew what that meant. RUN.

Bean stopped bouncing on the exercise ball she used as a chair. “If you don’t fill me in right now, I will make sure you get assigned to every trainee introductory tour until the end of time.” She fixed me with one of the stares that had earned her the job as the boss lady’s gatekeeper. “And that will just be for starters.”

That was a nuclear warhead kind of threat. I opened my mouth, prepared to give up my mother, my secret chocolate stash, and the keys to the vault on Meridian Five—but not the details of my assignment—when Yesenia’s door slid open. “You will learn the outcome of Journeywoman Drinkwater’s trip in due time, Lucinda. In the meantime, do you have the files for the new graduates ready? I’d like to look at them again before we match them with their first assignments.”

Any other assistant would have taken that as a very pointed message to get back to work. Bean just tilted her head slightly, dreadlocks shaking, and watched the two of us with avid interest.

Another reason she was the boss lady’s gatekeeper—Lucinda Coffey might be the only person on the planet who wasn’t scared of Yesenia Mayes. No one had any idea why that was the case. Bean had just shown up one day and turned herself into the most essential person on Stardust Prime.

“Journeywoman?”

By the tone of Yesenia’s voice, she’d been standing there indicating her door for more than the last nanosecond.

I gulped and moved my feet with dispatch—unlike Bean, I was plenty scared of the woman who ran all the parts of KarmaCorp I’d ever known.

I headed straight for my usual spot on the carpet, square in front of her desk. “Ready to report.” I might be nervy as a snake in a volcano, but I damn well didn’t intend to cower.

Yesenia slowly made her way behind the desk and took a seat in the towering black chair that trainees were occasionally dumb enough to call her throne. “I’ve been awaiting your arrival. I appreciate you coming to me so quickly.”

Her words carried no hint of whether she was about to rip off my head and feed it to a wormhole, or just put me on dustpan duty for the rest of my natural life. “I failed in my mission. I wanted you to know immediately.” A foolish gesture—transmissions traveled far faster than human bodies in space. She likely already knew every last sordid detail.

“That’s an interesting characterization.” She tilted her chair back slightly. “Why don’t you tell me your version of events and then we’ll decide whether you’ve tarnished your record, shall we?”

I tried not to stare and failed utterly. She was toying with me. The woman could be brutal, but I’d never seen her be cruel. I proceeded, stuttering, wondering whether she’d come up with a fate worse than wormholes. “I was sent to Bromelain III to arrange a mutually interested romantic relationship between the Inheritor Elect and a woman from a family of significant local stature. That outcome was not accomplished.”

She inclined her head slightly. “I hear Devan and Janelle were not overly cooperative.”

That wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to matter. “Local support is not required for successful assignment completion.”

Yesenia’s left eyebrow rose a very controlled centimeter. “How long are you going to stand there and quote me the manual that I wrote, Journeywoman?”

Oops. That was definitely pissed-off boss lady. “I’m done.”

“Good.” She sighed and shook her head. “I know you weren’t pleased to have this particular assignment in the first place. Would you like to hear why I sent you?”

Several very cranky replies popped into my head, side by side with the jaw-dropping astonishment of the boss lady offering to explain herself. A week in a flying tin can never has me at my best. A week of contemplating probable career suicide and the idiocy of pining for a man I would probably never see again while in that tin can had left me riding the thin edge of insanity.

I did, however, have enough remnants left to keep my mouth shut.

Yesenia stood, opened a chill box on her desk, and pulled out a shimmering glass bowl of fruit. “Here, it looks like you could use this more than I can.”

I kept my hands behind my back. The exotic fruit was worth a week of my salary, and the handblown Venusian glass it sat in probably ran a hundred times that. “No, thank you.”

“Journeywoman.” The bowl landed on my side of the desk with a decided thunk. “Sit down, shut up, and eat. Now.”

Shit. I sat. And after one more death glare from the other side of the desk, picked up the spoon. “Thank you.”

“Better.” Yesenia sat down and watched like a hawk as I took one small bite and then another.

Even a week’s worth of pent-up terror couldn’t make this taste like sawdust. I felt my idiot tongue revel in the bits of mango and pineapple and something that tasted like honey, and tried not to puke it back up.

If this was a condemned person’s last meal, it was a worthy one.

It wasn’t until I’d let the last spoonful slide down my throat that the woman on the other side of the desk spoke up again. “I sent you because you’re one of my most creative Fixers.” Her face could have given an ice sculpture a run for its money. “Although I must say that I didn’t count on Tameka giving that particular quality of yours a good, hard push.”

I was slightly stoned on mango and utterly lost. “I don’t understand.”

She frowned and looked at a place on the wall just over my right shoulder. “My job is not as easy as most of you think it is, Singer. We have very good men and women evaluating the energies of the universe, the places where the Talents of a Fixer might shift outcomes for the greater good.”

Any first-year trainee knew that. “And our job is to do the mission as assigned.”

“Correct.” She looked squarely at me again. “What you don’t know is that often the directives those good men and women issue are not straightforward. There are nuances, difficulties, gray areas. And in the case of this assignment, sometimes more than one possible desirable outcome.”

That definitely wasn’t something they told the first-year trainees. I stared at her, completely horrified. She was sounding like Tameka Boon.

“You wonder why we don’t tell you.”

I shook my head slowly. “No.” I could feel the answer congealing in my gut. “It would make us less certain, less likely to act with clarity and conviction.” It would make our Talents as wobbly as all hell.

I could still hear the sound of mine rending.

“For most, yes.” She was studying me very carefully. “Fixers are human beings, and most human beings prefer a clear direction to follow.”

My neurons had all chittered to a disoriented stop.

“Some don’t.” Yesenia’s tone was dispassionate, almost clinical. “Those who don’t are often our brightest and our best.”

Somewhere inside my brain of ice, comprehension landed. “Like Tameka.”

“Yes. What you as trainees learn of her is limited, and that is done at my directive. I don’t need a herd of Tameka Boons to manage.” She paused, an enigmatic look in her eyes. “But I do need a few. You have it in you to become one of them, Journeywoman. See that you do.”

I stared, shocked to the rock-bottom soles of my feet. “I’m a fifth-year Fixer who royally screwed up her assignment. I’m nothing like Tameka.”

“She doesn’t agree with you.” Yesenia said the next words as if they tasted slightly bitter. “And neither do I.”

I’d seen a miner who’d been inside a tunnel blast once. I was pretty sure I knew how he felt.

“Let me speak clearly, Singer.” Yesenia laid her hands on her desk. “This mission was the result of directives from the highest levels. It was quite clear that Devan Lovatt would be a major force in this quadrant one day, and also that there was value in encouraging his heart to open to a key relationship at this point in his life.” She inclined her head slightly. “The directives were much less clear on who that should be.”

I couldn’t stop staring. “You sent me to put him together with Janelle.”

She nodded crisply. “It is the outcome that the StarReaders anticipated to be most likely.”

I could hear it—the single note that she was clearly allowing me to hear. “You didn’t agree with them.”

“I am not always quite as certain as they are. I have some familiarity with strong-willed young people and the difficulty of predicting who they will become.”

My mind was jibbering, trying to take in the utter annihilation of the world as I knew it. And then the full, immediately relevant import of Yesenia’s words sank in.

“You expected this?” My astonishment was the size of a supernova and growing. “You sent me to Bromelain III knowing this would happen?”

She inclined her head slightly. “It was one of the possibilities.”

That was insane. “I’m a Fixer. He’s a man who will have to navigate a dozen bureaucrats before he can even enter inner-planet space.” Never mind the shoes he would be filling one day.

“Not all of us choose easy paths, Singer.” Her face gave nothing away. “You grew up digging holes in the side of a deep-space rock. I imagine you would find an easy life’s journey rather boring.”

This assignment had taken every possible crazy turn. At this point, I was just hanging on by my fingernails and trying not to die.

“I have one last thing for you.” She reached behind her and lifted up a small box. “Emelio Lovatt couriered this to my attention. The accompanying message from his wife indicates that you would know what to do with it.” She pushed the box across the desk and lifted the lid. “She also instructed me to make sure that you accept it.”

I gawked at the kilo stack of shrink-wrapped bacon. It would have cost a king’s ransom to send via galactic messenger. I looked at Yesenia, entirely stupefied. “Why on earth would they send me this?”

“You’re not usually so dense, Journeywoman Drinkwater.” The corners of her mouth hinted at what might almost be a smile. “I believe it is their way of telling you that they approve.”

I stared, every molecule of my brain totally fried.

“Go, Singer. You’ve got work to do.” Yesenia’s tone was back to brusque and businesslike. “And if a certain young man from Bromelain III is ever in need of a visitor pass, I will instruct Lucinda to aid him in any way necessary.”

I gaped. Bean could make anything happen. “You’re not dropping me down a wormhole?”

“Not today.” That hint of a smile was back. “Don’t make me regret it.”

I stumbled out of her office, the implications of her words racing through my mind and soul, setting fire to every neuron they touched.

I was not going to die today.

I was going to eat apple pie and bacon and hug my friends.

Yesenia had just given KarmaCorp’s tacit blessing to a romance between a Fixer and an Inheritor Elect. Which meant the StarReaders had too.

I had made the choices of a renegade—and not been branded as one.

And I would see Devan again.