Blowback (12 page)

The door opened and a new woman stood in the opening. “So, I
hear we have a branding,” she said with far more cheerfulness than Tom thought
was really warranted. He opened his mouth to say as much, but then Da’shay came
spinning out of the corner where she’d pressed herself.

“Words spun in light. Want it pretty,” she said, her eyes
getting that blank look they sometimes had on the ship.

“Fuck no,” Tom snapped. “I ain’t having you put something
pretty on me.” He gave the woman a feral grin. “Touch me and I’ll snap your
fucking neck.”

The woman looked at him with big eyes. “Oh dear. Maybe I’d
better get some help.” She backed up a step and was gone before Tom could even
promise to be good. Fuck. Now he was going to have some sons of bitches strap
him down while they branded him anyway.

Da’shay had turned toward him, her head tipped to one side
as she stared at him.

“Yeah, well fuck you too,” Tom said wearily. He was just
tired of trying to find the smart way through this. Da’shay sighed, but she
didn’t say anything as she went back to her corner, her hands stuffed down into
the pockets of her dress again.

Tom pulled against the handcuffs. He wanted to squirm and
struggle because that felt a whole lot better than giving in. It wasn’t as if
Da’shay cared. As long as he didn’t pull against the leash, she didn’t seem
even to notice him. That wasn’t entirely true. She’d noticed him this morning.
When he’d wanted to fight, she’d used her
genta
strength to hold him
still and stare at him until he had a need to check his face for any food that
hadn’t made it in his mouth. That wasn’t likely seeing as how he was chained,
but something in that
genta
brain of hers was spinning faster than
usual. She insisted on leaving his shirt off so that the new mark down his
chest was visible to anyone and everyone in the market. His mother used to say
you shouldn’t speak of the devil or he’d appear. Maybe there was some truth to
it because Tom hadn’t done more than think about the God’s rotten mark and
Da’shay stopped in the middle of the passage and slowly turned.

She cocked her head to one side. “Whispers.” The word came out
so soft Tom could almost imagine it had only been a sigh. Then she stepped
closer. Her hand came up and fingers trailed down over Tom’s arm, making the
arm hairs raise up. Tom tensed, his muscle bulging, and Da’shay paused. She
looked up at him with those dark eyes, and Tom wished he could read her mind.
Something was rattling around up there. She pressed her lips together in an
expression that almost looked like a cross between frustration and a woman
verging on crying. Seeing as how Tom was the one sold as a slave, he figured he
had more right to feel frustrated than she did.

“We going back to the ship now?” Tom asked. He didn’t like
the flashes of emotion on Da’shay’s face. If something brought her grief, he
should enjoy it. Yet when she got that pained expression on her face, he could
feel a nameless sort of guilt—as if he should fix something. She tilted her
head to the side and sighed.

“No,” she said wearily. She turned back toward the shops and
started walking. The leash forced Tom to walk behind.

Da’shay’s seemed happy enough to go shopping and ignore all
Tom’s very pointed hints about heading back to the ship. Avoiding the
Kratos
would be a sound tactical strategy if they knew for sure the
Kratos
was
safe, but they didn’t. Da’shay was acting as if their ruse had worked and
whatever asshole had come into Tom’s room had dismissed Ramsay and the crew as
harmless.

And now that Tom had a good chance to think on it, he wasn’t
even sure what that had all been about. He’d expected some sort of brain scanner,
but the man hadn’t even come back and Tom had been left to slavers. Da’shay
moved away from the terminal where she’d been searching for vehicles and headed
toward an escalator. With a sigh, Tom followed. He’d fight when the time came,
but this weren’t it.

She made it halfway toward the escalator before she stopped
to look in a glass fronted store tucked in along the side of the carved stone
corridor so that the window cast a bright ray of desert sun onto the jewelry.
Several people were already there, pressed close to the glass, and Da’shay
stopped just a few feet short of them, her head tilting as she looked in the
window.

Fuck. Slavery and window shopping. It was two nightmares in
one and Tom was chained up so he couldn’t even shake her until her neck snapped.
She turned and looked at him, blinking fast as though she were coming up out of
water.

“Should go before crystals shatter in water,” she said.

“Reckon we should,” Tom agreed even though he had no idea
where they were going. After a brief period where he could almost understand
her, she’d gone back to being all crazy.

She gave a nod and headed for the escalator again. A man
didn’t move fast enough and Da’shay shouldered him out of her way, sending him
face first into a wall. Tom bit his cheek to keep from grinning too much as the
guy spluttered and then fell silent when he saw it was a
genta
that’d
done it. If all
genta
were as unsociable as Da’shay, Tom figured the
whole race would have been invited to leave human space a long time ago, but he
wasn’t sure she even noticed just how much she was annoying others.

“Diamond in water. Sharp and sharp,” she muttered as they
rode down the escalator.

“Don’t care,” Tom muttered back soft enough that the woman
in front of Da’shay wouldn’t hear. Others tended to get flat-out offended when
Da’shay let Tom speak his mind. Slaves around here all had a beat look to them.
Even if they weren’t beat, they weren’t treated any kinds of right because
their eyes would skitter away to the floor the second they’d made sure they
weren’t going to walk into any walls.

Tom’s ma had that look after Lester’d been born. Lester was
her third, but he was sickly in a way that Andy and Tom hadn’t been. It was as
if Lester’s illness had sapped something out of her, and when he died before learning
to crawl, she never had been the same. The two boys right after that, Carl and
Evert, were monsters from about the time they’d been born, one right after the
other in the middle of an ugly night full of screams. His ma had never taken
them to task the way she had him and Andy. It was as though she was worn down
to nothing.

Made him want to punch someone, seeing slaves with that same
beat-down look his ma always got. That were the part of slavery that he
couldn’t stomach. He’d seen it when he’d been on the Anne Regina. The ship had
been tasked with transporting rescued slaves and more than one of them had
demanded to be given back to some owner. They’d had scars and they’d try to
make it sound like they’d deserved it.

Tom had survived a grand total of sixteen days on the Anne
Regina before the captain had transferred him off. He couldn’t even remember
the captain’s name now. He supposed it didn’t actually matter. When Da’shay got
off the bottom of the escalator and headed toward one more crowd of people, he
followed.

“Strings lacing together time.” Da’shay started hurrying
through this more crowded area, shoving people when they didn’t move fast
enough for her liking, and Tom followed. Outside a shop with a picture of a
small vehicle sitting on top of wheels taller than Tom, she stopped.

Pulling open the door, she pushed past four other people to
get to the counter. She was definitely in an antisocial mood today.

“Hey. There’s a line,” the man at the front of the line
complained.

Her hand snaked out and punched him in the nose and she
never even looked over. “Want a sandcar,” she said to the employee behind the
counter, putting a card on the counter. The man she hit sailed back and fell to
the floor, but then he pushed himself up into a crouch as if he was ready to
launch himself at Da’shay. Tom had no problem with hitting Da’shay, but it just
wasn’t right to hit her when her mind was slipping gears. Besides, Tom wasn’t
sure what that would do to his legal status if she went and got herself
arrested for killing the twerp, and unless Tom missed his guess, that was
pretty much where this was headed.

Before the guy could attack, Tom moved between Da’shay and
her latest victim. “She ain’t in a mood for games,” Tom warned him.

That seemed to shock the man right out of wanting to attack
and Tom watched the employee at the counter hurry to get Da’shay what she
wanted. He probably wanted her to go away as fast as possible, which wasn’t
such a bad goal.

“Move, slave.” The man made his disgust more than clear, but
then Tom had been disgusting middle class folks with his grammar and his
manners and his spotty use of showering facilities for pretty much all of his
life.

“Don’t think so, little man,” Tom said, making a point of
looking down at the guy. Even with his hands cuffed behind his back, Tom
figured he could probably take him, but he wasn’t sure what that would do to
his legal status either. He hated how much ignorance he was suffering these
days.

The man stepped forward as if he was going to hit Tom and
Tom braced himself, but another one of the customers from the line caught the
guy’s arm. “He’s new marked and he wasn’t the one who hit you.”

“Don’t need your help,” Tom just about growled, but a sharp
jerk at his neck told him that Da’shay was finally paying attention. He closed
his mouth and indulged in a quick fantasy of shooting her in the back of the
head and watching her fall.

She leaned around Tom and looked at the man she’d hit
carefully. “Could kill you,” she announced in a real clear voice. Tom couldn’t
quite figure out why that made the two men go white as ghosts until he looked
down to see a gun in her hand.

“Ain’t nice to aim those at folks,” Tom said, feeling a
twinge of amusement at the irony of him telling someone else that. Usually it
was Ramsay saying something like that to him. He debated moving in front of her
because he was almost sure she wouldn’t shoot him, and if she did, that wasn’t
necessarily a bad thing. However, he really didn’t want to get gut shot for
some fancypants who got upset about his place in line. Security had to be on
their way here. Even if Da’shay was a
genta
, people had a right to
expect she wouldn’t act too crazy. If she went and made pointing guns at people
a regular feature of her day, the authorities were going to get cranky. As much
as he couldn’t stomach being Da’shay’s slave, he really, really couldn’t
stomach being in some fucking auction.

“Should leave,” Tom tried again. Da’shay blinked, her eyes
still focused on fancypants. “Fucking hell, shoot him or don’t, but enough with
the just standing around,” Tom finally complained.

She looked at him. “Diamonds hidden in the waters, ready to
cut.”

“Don’t fucking care. I’d rather we get gone before someone
goes making a fuss,” Tom told her. The woman who’d been in line made an unhappy
little noise and Tom figured he’d offended her with either his language or his
lack of playing submissive for his owner, but he couldn’t bring himself to give
a damn.

“Want a sandcar,” Da’shay said to the man behind the
counter, tucking her gun into her pocket and acting for all the world as if she
hadn’t just threatened to shoot a man. Tom studied the hang of the fabric
suspiciously. The weapon wasn’t pulling, which meant she had a hidden holster,
probably under a slit at the bottom of the pocket. He wondered if that was new
or if she’d been carrying a weapon the whole time.

“I have our best model waiting for you. I embedded the code
on your car and the solar panels are fully charged. If you go to the garage
level right behind here, you’ll find it in slot 102 on level 17-7.” The man
froze and looked at Da’shay with growing concern. Tom could almost read his
mind.

“I got that,” Tom offered the man. No need to leave him to
worry that Da’shay was going to wander their garage terrorizing the customers.

The man’s gaze flicked to Tom, but he didn’t respond as he
handed the card to Da’shay. She took it and headed toward the stone arch where
a huge escalator waited. Instead of steps, each level of the escalator was
large enough for several people and even had a short bench on one side.

Da’shay pulled sharply on the leash and Tom muttered a few
curses as he followed her to the escalator. She claimed the bench and that left
him standing as the whole thing shifted downward in a spiral. It wasn’t all
that easy to keep his balance with his hands cuffed, so he focused on that
while the levels appeared, each with a number lit in neon green.

“Drowning in diamonds, little slices for mice to chew,” she
said softly.

“Uh huh.” After a few levels of offices, they were now being
taken past garages full of atmosphere hoppers and cars and in the distance it
even looked like a small shuttle. Tom filed that away for future use. Level
17-8 was mostly cars and Tom shifted closer to the edge of the platform so he
could step off, but Da’shay didn’t move and that pulled the leash tight.

“Cutting all the darkness so the light blinds,” she
complained softly when he looked back at her.

“We’re getting off here, so if you want that car you
ordered, get off your ass,” he suggested.

She reached up and scratched her shoulder. “Miss your gift.”

Tom snorted. That gift was about when things started really
to go south for him. Hell, he still wondered if her turning slaver didn’t have
something to do with the fact that Tom had nearly gotten her killed. Tom
figured that was good reason for holding a grudge, but he doubted that she
understood what he’d done. She might be qualified as a pilot and other ships
might have called her crew, but Tom was fairly sure she wasn’t mentally
competent to understand much of anything. When he was the smart one in the
room, they were definitely in some serious shit.

“This is it.” The angle of the escalator meant that their
section slid along at floor level for several yards before it went behind the
rock and curved down to the next level. “Now, pea brain,” Tom said, stepping
off and really hoping she came with him. If she didn’t, his leash would drag
him back onto the escalator and they’d have to find another way back to this
level. Luckily she followed him off.

Looking around, she seemed to finally engage with the world.
“Have to hurry,” she said as she looked down the two aisles and actually picked
the one marked with the right numbers.

“Why?” Tom searched the shadows for some sort of danger and
pulled at his cuffed hands again. He hated being helpless. “Something coming?”
She shook her head as if she were a dog coming up out of water. “Fuck, I don’t
know why I bother to ask you. Ain’t like you’re a font of useful knowledge.”

They reached the right slot and there was a sand car with
tires so tall that Tom couldn’t have reached the top even if his hands were
free. A ladder hung down from the side and led up to a small pyramid shaped
cabin perched six or seven feet up between the wide set tires. With tires
nearly five feet wide, this was going to be a beast to drive. He looked at
Da’shay suspiciously.