Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (10 page)

“Whose order was that?”

“Mine, of course.” He brushed the tears from her eyes with the thumbs of his velvet gloves. “I’m surprised you have to ask.”

Silver blinded her. Again her thoughts were shattered in the attack. This time no tears escaped. Hatred stronger than she could have imagined allowed her to hold her head upright so she could stare at him throughout the shock.

He held her gaze with a smile that revealed his sharpened teeth.

“How this must amuse you,” Raena said. Her only hope was that she could seduce him into releasing her from the chair, from the shocks.

“You have no idea how much I’m enjoying this,” he answered. “I wish I could enjoy it more. For now, though, I’ll leave you here to consider what you’ve done and how you might make amends. That is, if you have respite long enough to consider anything at all.” The hatch slid open behind him and he slithered out.

Raena stared after him as if her gaze could melt the cell door. Around her, the room measured a scant two meters square. That bastard knew she hated small rooms. In fact, he knew more than enough to destroy her.

A brilliant flash demolished those thoughts but only stoked her hatred.

Some uncountable time later, Thallian returned to gloat. “How have you occupied yourself, my dear?”

Raena stared at his perfect black beard and envisioned the shockingly white throat beneath. “There are forty-eight electrodes threaded through my scalp.”

“Very good.” He trailed a gloved finger across her lips, daring her to bite him. When she did not, he pouted. “I do care for you, my dear. I designed this machine to give you no pain. The shock merely disrupts your brain waves. It does no physical damage. Your body harms itself as it fights the machine.”

“So generous of you,” she mocked. Knowing that the pain was self-inflicted made the next wave easier to bear. It rolled off of her, leaving only a residual ache in her muscles.

“In theory, you will never be allowed long enough to attempt escape, but I am curious to see if the voltage will indeed prevent you.” Thallian bent closer to her. “Do you regret abandoning your post?”

“Not for an instant, my lord.”

Thallian grabbed her jaw. His kiss tasted like carrion, like everything venomous and rotten. She felt his hand slide down to caress her windpipe.

Another shock blotted out whatever happened next. When she was able to focus again, Thallian leaned against the door, his smile so self-satisfied she yearned to slap it from his face. “If the Emperor takes you away, he will return you to me in due time. I’ll have you yet, Raena, and then you won’t have this chair to protect you.”

Time passed, but Raena had no way to measure it, no meals or sleep to break the monotony. Left alone, her mind played tricks. Sometimes the walls crept inward, though she watched to keep them away.

For entertainment, she imagined the things she might do to Thallian, given a chance. Perhaps she would castrate him a millimeter at a time with a welding torch. Or she would mutilate his face with her knives. She hated herself while she hated him, because she had believed she loved him once.

Sometimes a med tech would come to check the needle in her hand. It occurred to her to beg them to help her overdose and escape him, but she decided against it and held her tongue. With her thoughts scrambled, Thallian could out-guess her every move. When he finally suggested the techs as an escape route, Raena only laughed at him. Her acceptance of her fate confused, then enraged, Thallian. Luckily, he grew bored with her after a while.

“Keep still,” someone whispered. “The cameras will only be off a few moments more and I don’t want my face flashed on Imperial channels. Bad for business.”

Raena looked up through the blur obscuring her vision. A med tech was pulling the electrodes from her scalp, but none too gently. She could feel the wires tearing free of her skin. Tiny prickles of blood oozed through her hair.

“… you doing?” she mumbled.

“Getting you out of here,” a man said from somewhere behind her. It was the first voice she had heard that wasn’t Thallian’s in what seemed like forever. Raena couldn’t remember its owner’s name.

“… ’s a trap,” she said in the same mumble, but already her brain was clearing. She noticed that he’d already pulled the tube of nourishment from the vein in the back of her right hand. The liquid trickled out to puddle on the floor.

She counted quickly. He didn’t have that many more leads to remove. Soon she’d be free of the chair. She realized her arms were already free and flexed her fingers.

Should she kill him before trying to escape the cell? This had to be a game of Thallian’s. Was there any way she could win it?

“We haven’t got long,” the man said, as if echoing her thoughts. “It’s the middle of the night. The guard is light. Can you shoot?”

“Yes,” Raena said decisively.

He set a med tech’s kit in her lap, pressed the release so it bloomed open for her. Inside she saw a disassembled Stinger sporting pistol. Raena got busy putting the pieces back together.

The man finished with the electrodes. He reached past her into the bag—their hands met briefly—to pull out a roll of gauze. He wrapped it sloppily around her head.

“Leave off,” Raena said. She yanked the gauze off angrily, dropping it onto the floor.

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’ll stop.”

He came around to face her finally. Raena squinted up at him: med tech uniform, new haircut, familiar muddy green eyes.

He spoke before she could admit that she really didn’t know who he was. “I couldn’t let him have you, Raena. I couldn’t let you be taken from me like that, without a fight.”

Gavin? She didn’t dare say his name aloud, on the slim chance that they would actually get out of this alive. No need to help Thallian identify her rescuer. Let him wonder.

“Are you insane?” she asked instead as he hauled her to her feet.

“Quite possibly. Ready?”

She slapped the power pack to make sure the connection was tight and thumbed the pistol live. And grinned.

He slid the jammer into the lock. Raena dove past him and found herself in Thallian’s office. That figured. She took out the guards with quick head shots, then waited for Gavin to come around her to unlock the door to the corridor.

As he punched coordinates into the lift control, Raena panted, “How did you get in to get me?”

“A med tech ID is surprisingly easy to get.”

The lift doors opened and Raena dropped the three men inside before they could react.

“You flew in with all the other med techs?”

“No, I needed my own ship to fly us out. So I hired a friend as pilot and told Flight Control I missed the last tech shuttle. We had the right codes, so they let us land. I’ve been lying low onboard, trying to find out where you were being held, for the last couple of days.”

Raena drew the medallion over her head and put it into Gavin’s hand. He looked it over. She knew the tarnished silver disk didn’t look like much, but he put it into his breast pocket anyway.

The lift halted. Raena shot the man waiting outside and slammed her fist on the doors closed button. “Why are you risking your life for me?” she asked.

“Those bastards tried to kill me with the Messiah. You should’ve seen me when I woke up with it stuck in my hair. I was terrified to look in the mirror.”

She examined him. He did seem older than she remembered, now that she got a clear-eyed look at him. “What happened?”

“I landed backwards in it. It looks powdery, but once you touch it, it’s gummy. I was practically sealed to the floor. I had to cut myself free, blind.” He mimed reaching over his head to hack at his hair. “Once I finally got off the floor, it took forever for me to comb it out. I never held my breath for so long in my life.” He grinned at her. “Anyway, I owed you.”

“Thank you.”

The elevator slowed as it reached the docking levels. Gavin checked the charge on his guns. “Let me shoot some this time.”

“No promises,” Raena said.

When the doors opened, an entire squadron had taken position outside, guns aimed and ready. Raena spun toward Gavin and gave him the only mercy she could. She knew what Thallian would do to him otherwise.

One shot took her down, too. Too bad the Imperial soldiers were only shooting to stun.

Raena straightened up and whacked her head against the wall. That helped her headache not at all.
All right
, she told herself.
Up. No more drinking. Find some tea
.

But her body didn’t want to obey. It remembered the aches she felt after the machine had tortured her. It remembered how much she had feared Thallian.

“He’s dead,” she whispered to herself. She forced herself to remember the strike of the match, the small magnesium flare of it in her fingers. She remembered flicking the match away, watching it spin end over end. She remembered the sound when the flame encountered the accelerant’s fumes. She remembered the smell of his body burning.

He was gone. She was safe. He was gone.

Raena rested her face against her knees and let the sobbing take her.

Later, after she heard the others up and moving around, she forced herself to get up and dress. She trailed her fingers over the mirrored catsuit that she’d bought on Kai the day she’d met Mykah and Coni. She loved the way it reflected the viewer back on himself, but today she didn’t feel like being so eye-catching.

She paged through the other outfits in her closet. None of the bright colors suited her mood. She passed beyond them to the things she’d salvaged when Mykah and Coni moved into Jain Thallian’s cabin.

The boy had been somewhat taller than Raena, but her heels made up the difference. He’d been slim, like his father, so that his shirts hung slightly loose on her. She stepped into a pair of black cargo pants and pulled a dark blue sweater over her head.

She wondered if she had drugged the boy, kept him imprisoned on the
Veracity
when she went to kill his father, if she could have ever tamed Jain. He had been his father’s favorite clone and had insisted he go home, but she’d known from the start that that was never going to end well. She marveled at herself for missing him now.

Why, she wondered, couldn’t she dream about Jain? She would have enjoyed talking to him again.

Mykah called the crew together for a late breakfast. It was simple today—some form of pressed protein sandwiched between two crisp yellow leaves. Of course, there was some unfamiliar red sauce on the side in which to dip it. Raena watched the others to see what they did before she approached her own food. Her stomach felt mutinous.

Mykah slipped a bottle onto the table in front of her as he sat down. “It’s cider,” he said. “It’ll help with the hangover.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly and twisted its cap off so she could sip at it.

Mykah settled in across from her. “We’ve been offered some work,” he said. “I’d like to take it. Mellix needs to get out of Capital City quickly. He is looking for reliable transportation.”

Haoun scoffed, “His network can’t organize it for him?”

Mykah and Coni exchanged glances. “Actually,” Mykah started, then looked down at his sandwich, before meeting Haoun’s gaze. “There have been death threats. A lot of people are unhappy about the ban on interstellar travel. They’re blaming Mellix as the cause of the ban. No regular ship will take him on as a passenger, in order to protect the other passengers and crew.”

“Even little ships?” Vezali asked.

“He’s not sure who he can trust,” Mykah answered.

“Why would he trust us?” Raena wondered. “Why should we risk it?”

“Mellix is …”

“He’s Mykah’s idol,” Coni supplied. “From the university. I understand why he would risk his life for Mellix.”

Mykah cut her off before she could say more. “This ship is a democracy,” he reminded them. “This might be dangerous, but you’ve watched Mellix’s work. You know how fearless he is. You know how much good he has done in the galaxy. If we can rescue him, I think … I feel like it’s my duty to help him.”

Raena got the feeling he wasn’t talking to her. She tried to puzzle out why. Since the ship was a democracy, he probably didn’t feel he needed her vote. It was the first time she’d seen him actually take command.

“I’m in,” Haoun said. “You can’t fly without me, anyway. But I grew up watching Mellix and I’d be honored just to meet him.”

Vezali nodded. “Same goes for me. I’m in.”

“Will you need me?” Raena asked. “It sounds like a pretty straightforward transport job.”

The
Veracity
was her home, the only home she had. She could gather her few possessions and disembark at Capital City, but she couldn’t calculate the odds of work ever bringing the
Veracity
back her way. Was this where they parted company?

Mykah and Coni exchanged glances again. Then Mykah said, “Mellix is in hiding now. Getting him from the safe house to the
Veracity
is going to be tricky.”

“Define tricky,” Raena suggested.

“We can’t dock at Capital City. All the docking slips are occupied indefinitely by ships that were grounded by the travel ban. The ships already there won the right to remain docked as long as their docking fees can be paid.”

“So how is the station getting supplies in and out?”

“They’re building an elevator. We will dock there, but the …”

“But the entrance would be the perfect place to ambush Mellix,” Raena said. “Do you have another plan?”