No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (6 page)

Eilif pulled one hand from her face long enough to wave vaguely at the screen beside her. Dreading what she might see, Ariel leaned around Eilif and opened the message there.

The boy on the screen was no more than thirteen. He held himself ramrod straight, like Raena or Eilif. He wore his glossy blue-black hair tied back at his nape. Black brows arched over eyes so much like his father’s that Ariel felt she’d been punched in the chest. Those silver eyes marked him as a Thallian.

However, this Thallian was still a child, whatever that meant in a universe where monsters like Thallian would clone themselves sons.

Despite the boy’s youth, Ariel could only see the face of her rapist when she looked at him. She set the message to play and stared at the floor.

“Mother, I’m sorry to have tracked you down like this. I didn’t know where else to turn. I need you to pass an urgent message to Raena Zacari, who saved me from our family. She must have saved you as well. I’m hoping you will know how to reach her. I hacked into the cameras in the city beneath the sea. Someone has patched the hospital dome and restored power. I saw someone moving in there. It may be nothing. It may be looters. I . . . I want it to be looters. I don’t want to think that Dr. Poe would try to bring him back.”

Ariel glanced up. The boy’s eyes shone with unshed tears. He looked just as frightened as they were.

“Raena forbade me to contact her. She said she would kill me and I believe her. But I . . . She needs to know this. As soon as you can tell her.”

Ariel demanded, “Which son is that?”

“Jimi,” Eilif said with certainty. “Raena told me she’d let him go.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes.” Eilif didn’t dissemble or explain.

“Shift,” Ariel ordered. Eilif abandoned her chair without complaint. After Ariel took it, she marked the message Extremely Urgent and forwarded it to the
Veracity
.

And that was all she could do for now. If Raena had a comm code like a normal person, she hadn’t given it to Ariel. Since her escape from prison, they’d never had an emergency that necessitated anything beyond leaving a message on the Shaad family priority channel for Raena to pick up at her leisure. Now Ariel didn’t dare wait around for Raena to check in. As far as Ariel knew, Raena never went far from the ship.

To calm Eilif, Ariel echoed what the boy said: “Maybe it’s nothing.”

But like the young Thallian clone, she feared it was something awful.

Ariel hit the silent alarm that would lock down the villa. She didn’t know if Jonan Thallian would come looking for Raena or to reclaim Eilif, but Ariel didn’t want to give the madman an opportunity to hurt any of them ever again.

She didn’t generally walk around armed in the house, but she kept a pistol tucked in her desk. She retrieved it and brought it back to Eilif.

“It’s past time for you to learn how to defend yourself,” Ariel told her. “Come down to the range and I’ll show you how this works.”

*   *   *

Although the nabe restaurant was mostly empty at this time of the afternoon, the staff still squeezed the five of them around a low square table toward the back. Haoun stretched out along the wall, put his chin down on his arms, and went to sleep.

No one said anything about Raena keeping him up too late, for which she was grateful.

Raena ordered soup for the crew. The slender lizard waitress delivered a big iron kettle full of broth and set it on the burner in the center of the table to boil. She brought out two large platters, one heaped with vegetables, the other with shellfish and mystery slices of meat. Chankonabe used to be one of Ariel’s favorite foods. Raena hadn’t tasted it since before her imprisonment. Nabe restaurants used to be easier to find, she thought, but maybe that was a function of where she used to find herself.

While the crew watched her stirring the vegetables, Mykah poured sake for everyone.

“Do we need to be drinking again?” Coni asked.

He laughed. “I need to be drinking. Here’s to surviving the morning.”

Before they put their cups down, Mykah told Raena, “At the risk of freaking you out again, I wanted to apologize for the documentary yesterday.”

She sipped her sake. “I don’t blame you,” she said at last. “I knew Mellix had a camera. I should have covered my face. I am an idiot for trusting a journalist to understand how much I loathe having my image broadcast across the galaxy.”

“But you’re a new person now,” Vezali pointed out.

“This new person is still paranoid,” Raena answered. “None of you know what it’s like to be hunted, never sure when or where you can sleep. The Empire had agents everywhere I went. Of all the things that have happened in my life, being on the run was about the worst.”

They digested that in silence, then Coni reminded, “There’s no one after you now.”

“No one that I know of,” Raena argued.

“I’m still sorry,” Mykah said. “Mellix might not have known, but I knew how you felt about it. I should have argued more strongly against including that close-up. I’m sure Mellix would apologize, too.”

“I doubt it,” Raena countered. “He’s enough of a showman to recognize a good story when he sees one.”

There was a pause in which she could see that they wanted to refute that, but couldn’t.

“He owes you his life,” Vezali said at last.

“And I can believe that revealing me to the galaxy was his way of thanking me. Doesn’t every celebrity believe that fame is the greatest gift they can share? But whoever attacked Mellix on Capital City is still out there. If they can’t find him, will they come after me?”

No one answered. Raena stirred her chopsticks around the cauldron. “I think it’s ready. Hold your bowls out and I’ll serve.”

*   *   *

After they’d polished off a second kettle of soup, Coni and Vezali went to use the facilities. Haoun went to settle the check and order himself some takeout. Mykah leaned over to talk to Raena. He knew he was drunk, but this might be the only time he had the courage for this conversation.

“Can I ask you about the fight today?” He heard himself slurring and swallowed hard, trying to regain control of his tongue.

Raena nodded, her face closed off like usual.

“What should I have done? They had me surrounded before I knew they were there. I knew you would have leaped at them, but the rocks underfoot seemed slippery. I knew if they got me face down in the water—hell, if they got me on my back in the water—I was dead.”

She took his hand and held it in both of her little ones. Beyond the differences in size and skin tone, hers was much more scarred. “Look, Mykah, you did exactly the right thing. You survived. You’re unhurt. Don’t second-guess that.”

“But what if you hadn’t been there?”

“Don’t be afraid to make some noise and call for help.”

“Will people help us? Since we’re human?”

“You won’t know unless you ask. If you’re shouting, you’re going to attract the lifeguard’s attention on the beach, the bouncer’s attention at the bar, Security’s attention on the street. People will help because they don’t want to be seen shirking their jobs. Cameras will come. That always helps, if you’re anywhere civilized.”

“If I’m alone?”

“If you’d had a gun, you should have kneecapped the leader. But you didn’t—and often you won’t. Use whatever you can reach. The beach stones. The sake bottle. Anything. All you want is to make the ringleader hesitate enough that you can run away.”

“That’s not very dignified.”

“Fuck dignity.” She snarled it so angrily that it sobered him. “It took years to get my dignity beaten out of me. Dignity will get you hurt. You do whatever you have to do to survive.”

That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I thought you’d have a no-fail attack,” he said sadly.

“I do.” She took another sip of sake. “Everyone underestimates me because I’m small. That means any attack I make is a surprise. That means I always start the game a move ahead. And since I don’t have any dignity left and I can make anything into a weapon, I’m hard to beat.” She clinked her cup against his. “As usual, Mykah, you don’t want to do what I’ve done to get into my position.”

“No lie,” Mykah agreed. Still, he envied her ability to take care of herself. “Thank you for coming to my rescue today.”

“My pleasure.”

He sensed it really was.

Before the silence could turn awkward, Raena said, “I have a question for you.”

“Anything.”

The conversation didn’t go in the direction he expected. “What’s it like to date someone who isn’t human?” she asked.

“Up until I started working on Kai, I never dated anyone who
was
human,” Mykah said. “Human girls . . . well, they were hoarded for a while.”

“You mean like harems?”

“Not really. So many humans died in the War that there was a big ‘save the species’ push. Women were valued for their ability to save us, so they got the best educations, protected jobs, plenty to eat, safe places to live, as long as they pledged to help repopulate.”

“Eugenics?”

“Yeah. Eugenics.”

“Cloning would have been easier.”

“The galaxy would have wiped us out,” he corrected. “There had been a cloning war out here before humans left Earth. The technology is still forbidden.”

“That’s why you didn’t spread the news about the Thallians all being clones,” she realized.

“Actually, we debated it. I was all for full disclosure, but Coni pointed out that the cloning revelation would just make humans look that much more depraved. We didn’t need to do any more damage.”

He realized that none of that really answered her question. “It’s great to date anyone,” Mykah said. “In my not-vast experience, love is love. Some people don’t have strong affinities for one species over another. Others do. I’ve never cared where my girlfriends came from, only how they treated me.”

“Thank you,” Raena said. “I’ve never concerned myself with gender before, but this is my first time with someone as cold-blooded as Haoun.”

He saw she meant it as a joke. Mykah wondered hazily if he should warn Raena about Haoun. Probably that ship had left the spaceport.

He didn’t know a lot about Raena’s romantic history, beyond Thallian and Sloane, but Haoun was so much less of a psychopath than either of them. Mykah wasn’t sure how things would play out, but he doubted that Raena would feel compelled to kill Haoun at the end of their relationship. That thought actually made Mykah laugh.

Raena looked at him quizzically. “I’m cutting you off, Captain. You’re not going to make it home safely if you’re chuckling to yourself.”

“My big, strong girlfriend will take care of me,” he assured her.

“No doubt.”

*   *   *

Raena thought the end of the meal might be uncomfortable, but Coni wanted to hustle Mykah off to sober up and Vezali had plans for a spa visit, so Raena and Haoun were left to their own devices.

By unanimous agreement, they tried out another hotel. This one had an enormous tub. Haoun drew the line at a bubble bath, but he made it up to Raena by exploring every inch of her. His overly long fingers were precise as they peeled away her clothing. He followed each article with his long, slightly sticky tongue.

For her part, Raena struggled to relax and enjoy the attention. She was familiar with taking pleasure from the pleasure others took from her. However, now that she was free, to be the recipient of so much attention without being allowed to reciprocate flustered her. She wanted to be an active participant: an equal, not a plaything.

She turned over in the tub so she could look Haoun in the face. Luckily, he wasn’t like the pocket-sized lizards she grew up with, who had an eye on either side of their heads. Like a predator, Haoun had binocular vision. She traced his hexagonal scales with her fingertips.

“I love to watch you fight,” Haoun told her, trailing his claws lightly down her arm.

Raena wasn’t sure if he mocked her. “Why?”

“You look like you’re having so much fun. Today, when you came up out of the water to face those guys, you had the scariest grin. You looked like you wanted nothing more than for them to make a move, so you’d know which one to take down first.”

Raena smiled. “You could see that?”

“You look like you were born to fight.”

“Not born to it, no.” She snuggled against him, enjoying his claws skimming the ridges of scars across her back. “Made for it, maybe. Certainly trained for it.” For a long time, fighting had been her favorite pastime.

She wondered, “When are you going to show me what your people do together?”

He gave her his barking laugh. “Aren’t you tired out?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he hedged.

“
Please
. You know I’m not going to let a little pain stand in my way.”

He buried his snout in the base of her throat, so she couldn’t see his eyes. Raena smiled to herself and ran her fingers around the scales around his tympanic membranes. He squirmed. She wondered if she’d made him uncomfortable, but he clutched her closer.

“Come on, Haoun. Be adventurous,” she teased.

“You are, without a doubt, the most perverse woman I’ve ever met.”

She took that as the praise it was meant to be. “Stellar.”

*   *   *

Mykah climbed dutifully into the shower to wash the ocean from his skin as Coni settled in to check the news for the galaxy’s reaction to the Messiah documentary.

Mykah wanted desperately not to think, but this thing today troubled him. Yesterday he’d noticed that Lautan didn’t have a lot of human visitors. Until Raena found the nabe restaurant, he hadn’t seen any human food. Raena was too innocent of the modern galaxy to understand what that meant, but Mykah had believed himself to be more aware. Still, he hadn’t taken the lack of humans as a warning. He’d allowed himself to relax, to buy into being a tourist. It might have gotten him killed.

He turned the water a notch hotter, hoping to counteract the chill in his blood. He couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to forget. Just because he had a Haru girlfriend and his crewmates were Dagat and Na’ash and he was legal co-owner of a sweet old Imperial ship, it didn’t mean he equaled anyone else in the galaxy. Like it or not, he would always be a visible representative of a species that had committed genocide.