Catalyst (10 page)

“Well, that’s good. You’ll have something to do here.”

“You have books?”

“Books?” Jacks looked at me.

“He likes old-fashioned books. He’s always reading them on Kithra.”

Jacks shook his head. “I have handhelds. They’re loaded.” He sighed and leaned his backside on the table behind him. “I
am
sorry my brother involved you two.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “But in a way, I’m kind of glad, because I want to know what happened to my planet. You said you were close? Maybe we can help.”

“Not close enough. I don’t know how long you’ll be here.” He gestured toward the simulator. “Luckily, I’m fully stocked. My brother will be bringing refill shipments within two months and this is the summer season here, so there are a lot of native edible plants and fruit.”

“Jacks, we can’t stay here two months. My family has to be worried. Can I call them and let them know I’m okay?”

“The people looking for me are some of the best Trackers and hackers out there. The line I use with my brother took months to build because I have it bouncing off signals all over the worlds.” His mouth turned down. “But I’ll begin building new threads and get a line to someone in your family. Someone on Kithra?”

My shoulders slumped at the thought of not talking to my sister for months. “My sister, Yaira.”

He looked at Bastian. “And you? Who do we need to contact for you?”

“I have no one.”

Jacks blinked. “You lost everyone in the explosions?”

Bastian shook his head, auburn hair falling silkily around his face and partially covering one eye. “No, my mother took me off planet when I was young. She’d planned to go back to her family, but they were all killed. So was she—off planet.”

I watched Bastian, the way he held himself still even as he spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. It was impossible to imagine being that alone. Even when I’d taken off on my own, I knew I had family caring about me no matter where I went. “He grew up in an orphanage on Sector Two, Jacks.”

Jacks closed his eyes. “I know that place.” He turned and looked at all the vidscreens on the opposite wall, watched as his software searched, found, cut and pasted. Hundreds of conversations tagged, just in the short time we’d been in the room.

It hit me then. Jacks had sacrificed his entire life to right what had happened to Kithra. He lived alone here, in hiding, and he had never given up. He worked day and night, looking at these files, searching for the truth.

He was still the good man I’d been so crazy about as a girl. And I didn’t know how I felt about this knowledge.

“I call it the court.” Jacks pushed open the heavy door and walked outside.

I hesitated. Trees. Lots and lots of trees filled the open space. Big, like the ones that housed the lizard monsters.

Bastian grabbed my hand and pulled me outside. “I told you about this place. No typhons out here.” Bastian sighed happily. “Take a look around. It’s beautiful, like Kithra.”

Jacks reached over his head and tugged two red orbs from a leafy branch before handing one to each of us. “It’s some kind of fruit, but like nothing I’ve tasted before.”

It was the size of my palm. I squeezed the lightly fuzzed skin, feeling a slight give underneath.

“Go ahead, try it. It’s safe.” Jacks turned and strode through the trees. “I had all the food here tested. Stay away from the yellow fruits that look like apples as well as anything green. Ironically, anything that color holds a lot of nutrients, but something in it doesn’t agree with the human digestion system. Or mine, at least. You two can try.”

Gwinarians and humans had the same insides. I wouldn’t be trying anything that made him sick, even though my people had adapted to Kithra, giving us slightly stronger digestive systems.

Thick vegetation lined the path. Insects and other larger creatures scurried over leaves and branches. Some of the insects buzzed so loudly, I expected them to fall from above and land on our heads at any second. I saw another one of those huge, black bugs like the one that had crawled over my hand the first day in the forest.

“I think this was the main gathering place for whoever once lived here. The vegetation grows fast, so I have to come out here and cut the path every week.”

“You have ground lasers?” Bastian asked.

“No, I use an old-fashioned scythe. It’s great exercise.”

“That would explain the muscles,” I murmured. Then I forgot how to breathe. In the middle of his court, there were rectangular stone pools surrounded by tall trees with long, feather-leaved branches that offered shade in the harsh light. Water plants decorated the edges of the pools, round and velvety-looking in colors of yellow, blue and green. He had four lounge chairs lined up by one of the larger pools.

“My brother and some of his crew make an effort to stay long enough for a swim. He brought the chairs. They’re comfortable. Juniper threatened to leave with them the last time they came.” He laughed and shook his head. “Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. We’ll take them inside with us. I can sleep on one of these and you two can use my bed while you’re here.”

I walked to the chair, sat and leaned back. “Oh, these are nice. I wouldn’t mind sleeping on this myself.”

“Sleeping alone is no fun.” Bastian knelt by the water, pointed at a plant with floating, round leaves. “These remind me of Earth lily pads. Are they safe to touch?”

“You can touch most everything out here. The water is safe for swimming, though I wouldn’t drink too much of it. I do use it to restock the simulator where it’s filtered heavily.”

I sat up. “Jacks. We’re both used to working. If we help you read the conversations, could it help get you closer to your goal? I just got back to Kithra. So did Bastian. We really do want to get home soon.”

“You can help. And I’m sorry my brother messed up.”

“But you needed sexin’ up,” Bastian pointed out. He chuckled and began to lift his T-shirt.

Jacks held up his hands. “Whoa! No, no I don’t. You have to ignore Anders. He’s always been kind of blunt and he’s a nymphomaniac. He’s probably driving my brother crazy.”

“He deserves it,” Bastian said, tugging off his shirt.

Jacks started backing up, looking everywhere but at Bastian. “I have to spend some time on the files. I’ll set you two up tomorrow, show you how you can help. For now, enjoy the pools. And don’t forget—you shouldn’t eat anything green or yellow.” He turned and stalked off.

I grinned at Bastian. “You were being naughty.”

“I was just going for a swim,” he countered.

“You know very well he won’t be able to resist once he really looks at that body of yours.”

Bastian stood and came to me. He leaned over the chair, his hair falling on either side of my face, enveloping us in a private world tinted with auburn. “You think my body is that good, huh?”

“I know it is. So do you.”

He laughed, kissed me, and walked back to the water, dropping his clothes the entire way. I lay back and decided to enjoy the show.

That night, Bastian was asleep a second after we fell into Jacks’ bed. I wasn’t so lucky. I lay there a long time, thinking about everything I’d learned. Something about the story nagged at me, so I carefully crawled from the bed, stuffed my feet into my boots and scooped up a replicant crystal. I followed the stone halls back to the room with all the computers.

Jacks and Bastian had carried one of the long, red chairs into the room and Jacks lay back on it, his ankles crossed, one arm behind his head. His other hand held a vidscreen. He caught me in the doorway and sat up.

“Tell me about the explosive.” I felt like my heart was trying to crawl up through my throat.

“You sure?” Jacks set the vidscreen down on the chair and stood. He walked to me, touched my arm, concern darkening his blue eyes.

“I need to know.”

Nodding, he walked to the big chair in front of the main wall of screens, sat and pulled a wireless keyboard into his lap. A few clicks later, an image opened on the biggest screen. “It’s grainy because I was using a faulty vidscreen. But this is it. The device. It had some kind of remote controlled mechanism on the top. The entire box was only an inch long.”

I squinted at the image even though it was big. Jacks was right, it was grainy. “There’s a fine layer of powder, very small. Looks white. It must be some kind of pyrophoric metal, maybe air ignited.” I pointed at the top. “Small powder, small hole in the top. Whatever it is, it’s powerful. There had to be a lot of these in the mines.”

Jacks shook his head. “I didn’t see them.”

“That small, they would have been hard to spot.” Hugging my arms tight around myself, I stared at the image of the evil thing that destroyed my world. “Why didn’t you take it?”

The agony that crossed his features dug into my belly like sharp claws. He closed his eyes. “I was afraid to move it. I knew it was some kind of explosive. Just touching it could have set it off.” He stood, slammed the small keyboard down onto the table and scrubbed his hands over his face. “I ran to find Crichton, we argued. I could see the fucking guilt on his face, though he wouldn’t tell me anything. Only that he was sorry he’d shared my maps. Then he got this look—he apologized, rubbed his thumb over my lip and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in a small mining colony in Sector One.”

“He drugged you.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “There has to be more to the story, Jacks. I found record of you leaving Kithra. I also know you paid for my family’s vacation. Why would you have gotten me off that planet if you weren’t a part of its destruction?”

Genuine surprise showed on his face.

“You didn’t pay for it,” I whispered, staggering back to sit in the chair. “Then who?”

He was silent for so long I didn’t expect him to answer at all. “It must have been Crichton.”

“Why? Why would he do that? I mean, if he was evil enough to blow up an entire planet of people…”

“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense, Vala. Crichton wasn’t evil. Maybe he and whoever else was in on this had no idea what would happen. Maybe the substance was new.”

“Maybe it had never been tested in Kithra’s gassy atmosphere.” I blinked, my eyes burning. I didn’t cry. I never cried. But this was too much to take. And Jacks had spent all these years trying to solve this ridiculous puzzle. “I still don’t see why Crichton would have paid for my family to leave.”

The smile that tugged at the corner of Jacks’ mouth held more sadness than humor. “He knew I loved you.”

We stared at each other, my heart pounding so hard it hurt. I didn’t know if I believed him, though he looked sincere. There were too many hard years between then and now. I cleared my throat, stood and backed up a couple of steps toward the door. “Well, um…Bastian and I will help you work on these files, and I do want you to set up a way for me to contact my sister. My family has been through—
lost
—too much to deal with fear over what’s happening to me.”

“I will.”

I started walking toward the door, then glanced over my shoulder. “The Tracker you tried to kidnap? She’s tenacious as hell. You might want to think about working faster.”

We worked long hours going over the files pinged by Jacks’ software. I took the sections related to the mysterious explosive, studying news stories, scouring countless entries on explosive materials, chemical discoveries. That section alone would take years to go through and this after Jacks had used other software to break down the first flagged sections.

He needed an army of readers.

I found myself staring at him a lot. He’d been here on his own, unable to trust anyone. Years spent reading obscure files, knowing that Saturna had the money to hire good Trackers, hackers and worse, hit men. His brother’s crew followed the leads Jacks discovered and that crew was small, comprised of the few people they trusted.

Crichton was out there. The person responsible for killing so many and for saving Jacks’ life. And mine. Because, according to Jacks, Crichton’s lover had loved me.

It was a lot to take in, to process.

Jacks stared back. He watched Bastian and me, his gaze so pointed that at times it felt like a physical caress.

That visual caress woke me two weeks after his confession. My hair obscured most of my face, so I cracked one eye to find one lone replicant crystal resting on the edge of the bed. I didn’t move, but I must have tightened muscles because Bastian squeezed his arms around me. His chin rested on top of my head, so the light would be cast on his face as well. He nuzzled the back of my head with his nose, something I’d felt him doing often in his sleep, before tucking my head under his chin again.

In the shadows, I could barely make out Jacks’ form. What I could make out was his tension as he leaned against the wall, tension that coiled so tightly, he looked ready to combust. The strength of his desire to be in our bed rivaled that of his need to find Crichton. I couldn’t help but wonder if, like me, that old love still burned somewhere in the depths of his body. If maybe that love he spoke of toward me still existed.

Desire definitely did.

He stepped away from the wall and I closed my eyes, sensing him coming toward the bed, standing over us. He stayed still so long, it took all my effort not to open my eyes. He took the crystal and left the room.