Estranged (21 page)

“
You weren’t there! You
didn’t have him—” Kalei cringed and faltered at the memory of
Xamic’s hand around her neck. She clenched her fists. “He knows.
And I need to stop him before he can lay a hand on those girls. Are
you going to tell me where they are or not?”

He didn’t answer as he continued to
maintain his thousand-yard stare.

Kalei muffled a frustrated scream.
“Fine! I don’t need you. I’ll find Fenn myself.” She spun around
and started toward the door.

Terin called after her, “I warned you
before.” Kalei stopped. She heard his chair drag against the short
carpet as he stood up. “If you try to find Fenn, I’ll have to kill
you.”

Kalei turned back with a snarl. “Go
ahead and try.”

Before Kalei could react,
Terin had her by the neck, lifted her off the ground, and slammed
her against the wall. Her elbow struck the side of his TV and it
crashed into the floor with a dull
crack
.

“
You want to know how to
kill Estranged?” Kalei was surprised by his sudden attack, but she
was even more surprised when she saw the tears in the corner of his
eyes. The tears contrasted sharply against his rage. Terin’s grip
tightened around her throat. “I’ll show you how to kill an
Estranged.”

His teeth clenched, the muscles in his
jaw flexing, and he glared into her eyes. Kalei felt her heart
race, her breaths came rapidly as she strained against the pressure
on her windpipe. She could feel his nails sinking into her flesh as
the weight of her body pressed against his hand. But Terin didn’t
move, and his darkness didn’t advance.

After several more erratic heartbeats,
Terin looked away. He loosened his hold and let her slide to the
floor, keeping his fingers wrapped around her neck. Kalei heard him
mutter, “I never wanted this for you.”

Then he looked back at Kalei, steel in
his eyes. He drew his arm back and slammed her skull into the wall,
sending the room spinning into darkness.

Kalei could feel her face pressed
against something cold and smooth. The pressure of the object
against her cheek and shoulder seemed to be holding her
erect.

The joints in her legs complained as
they sat tucked beneath her at awkward and painful angles. She
couldn’t fully stretch them out because her feet were already
pushed up against something solid behind her. Confused, Kalei
opened her eyes and pulled her legs forward into a more comfortable
position.

She found herself sitting in a glass
tube. It had a cement floor with a perfect circle of glass sealing
her in on all sides. She had barely enough room to move her elbows,
no more.

Looking past the glass, Kalei realized
she wasn’t alone. Another dozen tubes lined either side of the long
hallway, each with another person – another Estranged – within.
They were like so many test subjects, lined up for study. Some of
them slept, some of them cried, some of them shouted intermittently
or banged on the glass with bloody knuckles. Kalei might have done
the same, if she didn’t already know it was pointless.

She knew where she was. This was
solitary confinement. Built several levels below the basement of
headquarters, this was where SWORDE put Estranged who were too
dangerous to wander the district on their own. She had been given a
tour during training. At the time, she had wanted to kill every one
of them for being murdering bastards. Now she wondered how many of
them were like her: people who had simply pissed off
Terin.

But was she really in here
because she had pissed him off? It was more likely he had
discovered her connection to Tusic.
Dammit!
She had grown pretty lax
about where and when she met Lecia. It didn’t surprise her that
they had found out. Kalei had never exactly been trained for
espionage.

She reached her hand out and traced
the curving line where the cement and glass came together to form
her cell. She knew the cement wasn’t holding the tube up.
Apparently, the ground beneath was hollow, allowing the glass to
slide up and down using some mechanism below. But all Kalei could
see was a small black gap between the two surfaces, no larger than
the width of a wedding ring. She pulled her hand back.

Kalei knew she couldn’t break out.
Erit had offered her the chance to execute these dangerous inmates
if only she could crack the glass. Even with a pistol at close
range, she couldn’t make a scratch. In fact, she nearly killed
herself when she tried.

She leaned her head back against the
tube and looked up at the featureless, cement ceiling. The only
things to interrupt its monotonous grey expanse were the bright
lights recessed into the cement at regular intervals, drawing a
straight path along the center of the hall. Kalei’s eyes traced the
path of the lights to their beginning, and then her eyes slid down
to settle on the heavy steel door that marked the entrance to the
prison.

What is happening out
there? Is Fenn really all right as Terin said, or is Xamic on his
way to kill him now?
Perhaps he was
already dead.

Kalei punched the
glass.
No!
She
refused to believe that. She refused to accept that he was. Even
if—No. Fenn and the girls were alive. She remembered Xamic’s
darkness within her, the way it resonated with his innermost
thoughts while he held her hostage. When he spoke, she could sense
the emotions – the truth behind his words. Xamic knew Fenn was
alive, and he knew where to find her husband. But his intentions
didn’t feel like death. They felt like... excitement? Elation? That
couldn’t be right. Perhaps she had just imagined it.

But where is Fenn? And the
girls?
Kalei furrowed her brows.
What about their father?
Kalei shifted her weight in an attempt to find a more
comfortable position.
Come to think of it,
what did they tell Qain when he came back from his trip to Takaio?
Had they kept him from seeing his daughters, or did they take him
into protective custody as well?
Kalei
couldn’t see that going well. Qain was a high-profile employee for
a high-profile company. There was no way he would allow them to
take him off the map.

But then again, being a high-profile
employee for a high-profile – international – company meant it
would be easy for Qain to pick up and move. Were they even in Celan
anymore?

Kalei tried to imagine
Fenn lying on some beach somewhere without her. It was hard, not
only to imagine him alone, but to imagine him leaving without her.
She knew Fenn; he wouldn’t have left without a fight. They must
have told him that she was dead,
or what
if Xamic really had told him that I’m...

But what did she know? She wasn’t
there when they enrolled him into Victim’s Protection. What if he
just skipped into the office, happy to be free of his nagging
wife?

Kalei shook her
head.
Stop it. You know that wasn’t the
case. He loves me, and I love him. He wouldn’t do that.

But that was then. What
about now? It has been two years since the attack...

Kalei remembered the night before her
first day at the police station. A hundred thoughts had run through
her mind, each more bizarre and paranoid than the last. What if she
spilled coffee on the police chief? What if her partner was a
smelly old man? But there was one thought that was more plausible
and scary than the rest. What if she died on the job?

It didn’t happen all the time, but it
happened. Kalei started to think about what the world would be like
if one day she just... wasn’t here.

A sudden fear had grown inside her and
she woke up Fenn. She told him that if she ever passed away, be it
that day or a hundred years off, she wanted him to remarry. She
didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life miserable over the
woman he had lost. She wanted him to find love again, to be happy,
to live his life. She wouldn’t let him rest until he
promised.

Fenn had run his hand through her
hair, looked her in the eyes, and told her he would never love
another woman the way he loved her. She was the only one in the
world for him. But if this was what she wanted, then he promised he
would find love again, even if it could never touch what they had,
and he wanted her to do the same.

When they made those promises, Kalei
had never imagined she would become... this. Estranged. She was
dead to Fenn, but at the same time, she was still very much
alive.

She knew he should forget about her;
it was better for him that way. But what if he had listened to her?
What if he had found some woman to comfort him through his grief,
to hold his hand, to keep his bed warm at night...?

Kalei’s hands began to tremble. She
began to fidget with the diamond ring on her left hand, its largest
diamond sitting on the white gold band like a queen announcing her
shining presence to the world, while a trio of smaller gems framed
it on either side. Its beautiful design brought back memories of a
candlelit dinner and a question she had been breathless to
answer...

Kalei gritted her teeth against the
tears streaming from her eyes and the painful tightening of her
throat. The swirls on her nails began to bleed and blur. The biting
pain in her heart turned into a cruel stabbing and twisting that
made her stomach clench. When the sobs came, she couldn’t stop
them.

She sat like that for ages. It could
have been a week or a year; she had no way of knowing. Time didn’t
make itself known in this damned dungeon.

Then she heard a few shouts and calls
from her fellow inmates at the far end of the hall, followed by the
steady rhythm of two boots thumping against cement. She lifted her
chin off her chest and saw a Warden approaching. She watched the
dark figure’s advance with dead eyes.

The Warden stopped at Kalei’s tube.
Kalei raised an eyebrow at him as she heard a grunt, and then the
Warden pulled off his helmet. It was Wexley, the old weapon master.
Well, Shenaia called him old – the man was in his late fifties, his
hair not entirely turned to grey yet. Not that it ever would,
considering the man was Estranged. Kalei knew him well from all the
time she had spent at the range. She only belatedly remembered that
he was in charge of solitary too.

As Wexley tucked his helmet under his
arm, he grumbled, “Fuck protocol. This ain’t exactly by the book to
begin with.”

Kalei smiled in spite of herself. She
hadn’t realized how desperate she was for information until she saw
the man. “Hey, Wexley. How’s it going? What’s going on out
there?”

Wexley studiously ignored her, walking
over to the wall behind her tube where steps had been carved out of
the cement. The steps created a slight, curving path that hugged
the back side of her tube and climbed all the way to the open top
about twenty feet above.

Kalei persisted, “Hey, Wexley. C’mon.
At least tell me what you’re doing. Shenaia and I took good care of
your guns. Yeah, we might have burned through a lot of ammo, but we
always cleaned up, helped you out around the range. C’mon, Wexley.
Don’t give me the silent treatment.”

When he reached the top of the
staircase, Wexley pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it
into the tube. Kalei watched the small white package grow larger as
it dropped. She held out her hands to catch it, but the object
moved so fast it shot between her outstretched fingers and hit
Kalei’s knee with a soft thud. The package split open, splattering
brown refried beans across the glass and hitting Kalei in the face.
Kalei wiped the mess from her cheek and opened her eyes in time to
see a burrito slide out of the white wrapping and fall limply to
the ground.

Wexley returned to ground level and
told Kalei, “Shenaia thought you’d want some food. Hell if I know
why, but she wouldn’t leave me alone ‘til I gave it to you. Don’t
recommend eating it, though. There’s no way in hell I’m cleaning
out that cage when it comes back ‘round.” He winked at her.
“Unless, of course, you got a little sugar to spare.”

Kalei snatched up the remains of the
burrito. “You can tell Shenaia I don’t want her fucking burrito!”
She attempted to throw it out of the tube, but within the confines
of the glass, she couldn’t pull her arm back far enough to make a
decent throw. The burrito weakly flew several feet up the tube and
then came falling back down, nearly hitting her again. Kalei
managed to dodge this time, and it hit the floor with an unpleasant
squelch.

Wexley laughed and said, “Well, have
fun with that. And you’re right, you girls were pretty kind to my
guns. And pretty kind on the eyes too. Thank you for that.” He
winked again and turned to leave.

“
Hey!” Kalei screamed.
“What’s going on out there? Is Fenn still alive? Wexley!
Wait!”

Without stopping or slowing, Wexley
yelled back, “Just be glad you got that much. I’m not allowed to
talk to inmates, y’know.” He reached the door at the far end of the
hall and disappeared through its frame.

Kalei’s world shrank once more to the
size of her small glass circle. Except now she had company. She
would have kicked the burrito, except she didn’t want the damn
beans all over her shoe. Not that they didn’t already cover half
her pants and most of the cell. Kalei sighed and smacked her
forehead against the glass. After a moment, she reached up her
hands and held its surface beneath her open palms. Then she slowly
pulled her fingers closed, wishing she could pull the barrier away
like a curtain. But it stood, impervious to her desires.