Starflight (2 page)

Before Solara could respond, Doran’s girlfriend made a noise of disgust and whined, “Come on, Dory. Not that one. She’s so…dirty.”

Solara’s cheeks blazed. She’d taken great care to scrub her face at the public bathhouse that morning, even paying extra to have her hair washed and plaited in the latest style. “
She
is standing right here. And I’m not dirty.”

Doran snapped his gaze to hers, his black brows forming a slash above blue eyes cold enough to frost the fiery moons of Volcanus. “Let’s get something straight, Rattail. If I agree to finance your passage, the only words that will leave your mouth for the next five months are
Yes, Mr. Spaulding.
If you disappoint me in any way—if my every wish is not brought to fruition—I’ll drop your carcass at the first outpost. Do you understand?”

Solara held her breath while a furious pulse pounded in her ears. Five months as Doran’s slave or a year on the streets. Unpleasant as it was, the decision made itself.

“Yes,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes,
Mr. Spaulding
.”

“That’s better. See?” he said to his girlfriend. “She can be trained.” He pointed at Solara’s wrist. “Where’s the matching band?”

“You buy it from the machine,” Solara told him, nodding at the kiosk beside her.

Once Doran transferred the credits to pay her fare, the gate opened with a beep and an
M
-emblazoned bracelet dropped into the collection tray. He slapped the band around his wrist, linking them as master and servant.

“Quit standing there,” he said. “You can start by taking Miss DePaul’s bag.”

But the girl—Miss DePaul, presumably—gripped the handle of her pet carrier with ten red-tipped fingers. “I don’t want her touching my things,” she declared, and clicked toward the boarding platform.

Doran shrugged and handed Solara his tuxedo jacket. When they reached the boarding entry, he shouted, “The door, Rattail. Open the door!” She scrambled ahead of him and heaved aside the metal barrier. As Doran preceded her through the gateway, he murmured, “Well, you’re off to a poor start.”

Solara clutched his jacket and resisted the urge to choke him with it. Maybe there
was
something worse than not being picked.

T
he beeping awoke her from a dead sleep, but in her foggy state, Solara couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She scanned the darkness for the source of the awful sound until a pillow arched up from the bottom bunk and smacked her in the face.

“Turn off your band!” hissed one of her roommates.

Understanding dawned, and Solara tapped the Accept button on her bracelet. By now, she should be used to Doran’s constant requests. The sadistic jerk hadn’t allowed her a full night’s rest since they’d boarded the
Zenith
a month ago, so he wasn’t likely to start now.

“He’s ruining my sleep,” another roommate whispered. “Why does he keep torturing you?”

That was a good question.

Solara pulled on a pair of pants and thought about it. The obvious answer was his white-knuckled hold on a grudge from freshman year, the urge to put her back in “her place” after she’d won his father’s award. But aside from that, sometimes she wondered if Doran craved attention. He reminded her of a boy in the group home who used to pull her hair. When she’d complained to the nuns, they had brushed off her concerns, claiming that the boy liked her. But she didn’t enjoy having her hair pulled, so she’d put a stop to it by sinking her fist into the boy’s stomach.

Maybe that was what Doran needed.

After wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she slipped quietly into the hallway and waited for the motion-sensor night-lights to activate. Soon a thin strip glowed in the middle of the floor. She knew from experience it would take 872 steps to reach Doran’s first-class suite from her position in the steerage class level, so she didn’t waste another moment getting there. The last time she’d waited too long to respond, he’d fallen asleep, only to summon her an hour later to pull a clean shirt from his walk-in closet. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he hated small spaces. It made her want to lock him inside a luggage trunk.

She knocked softly on his door. Most valets had key fob access programmed into their indenture bands, but of course Doran didn’t trust her enough for that.

Once the door slid into the wall, she stepped inside his suite and immediately stopped short to survey the damage. He’d hosted another party. The empty bottles littering the carpet made that clear. Someone had overturned the sofa and rearranged the furniture in what appeared to be a tic-tac-toe grid, and naturally she would have to clean it up. But that couldn’t be why he’d called her in the middle of the night.

Or could it?

She slid a glare toward his bedroom but refused to go in there. If the lingering scent of Miss DePaul’s perfume was any indication, he wasn’t alone.

“Did you need something?” Solara shouted.

Doran’s voice was sleep-roughened when he demanded, “Excuse me?”

She closed her eyes and drew a slow breath. “How may I assist you, Mr. Spaulding?”

“I’ve got insomnia,” he said. “So I might as well make use of it and get some work done for my internship. Come in here and take notes for me.”

Solara didn’t move.

It was one thing to fetch a T-shirt from his closet, but spending time with Doran inside his bedroom—in the middle of the night? Not for all the fuel in all the ore refineries in all four quadrants of the galaxy.

A rustling of blankets sounded from the other room, followed by a heavy sigh. “Stay there,” he grumbled. “I’ll get dressed and come to you. But for future reference, anyone who stinks like a toolshed is safe from my advances.”

Frowning, Solara lifted a lock of hair to her nose. She’d spent an hour touring the auxiliary engine room yesterday, but she didn’t smell like grease. At least, she didn’t think so.

He padded into the living room wearing a dark bathrobe that concealed everything but his bare feet. “Feel safer now?”

She answered, “Yes, Mr. Spaulding,” and meant it for once.

Doran turned an armchair upright and plopped into it, not bothering to create a seat for her. He flicked a wrist toward the opposite wall. “You’ll find a tablet on the desk. I assume you know how to transcribe, considering all the years the headmaster let you spend at my school.”

Jaw clenched, she nodded.

“I’ll dictate from my…” He trailed off as a trio of lines wrinkled his forehead. “Damn it. Where’s my data file?” Without giving her a chance to guess, he made a shooing motion with one hand. “I’ll have to find it. Wait in the hall. I don’t want you to see where I keep my valuables.”

Solara suppressed an eye roll. The only thing she wanted to do with his data file was soak it in hot sauce and shove it up his nose, but she obediently waited outside until he reopened the door. Then she powered on the tablet and opened a new document.

“I’m ready,” she said.

But Doran had fallen silent. She glanced down and caught him staring at the felony tattoos on her knuckles, his face leaking color by the second. The whites of his eyes kept growing until he looked like he’d seen a demon, and Solara half expected him to retreat to his bedroom and pull the covers over his head. She cursed herself for leaving her room with naked hands. She should have remembered to put on her gloves.

“You didn’t have those when you were at my academy,” he said, tugging absently at his earlobe. “I would have noticed.”

“No.” Her first instinct was to look at her knuckles, but she fought it. She didn’t want to see them. “They’re fresh. Only a few months old.”

Doran swallowed hard, his gaze never leaving her hands. She found it odd that he hadn’t laughed at her yet, not that she was complaining. “That’s why you didn’t graduate. You were expelled.”

“I still graduated,” she said. “Just not from the academy.”

“What did you do?”

The question made her shoulders go tense. It always did. She knew she could give him the easy answer—she’d been caught stealing. But that wasn’t the half of it. As the nuns always said, the devil was in the details. It was the details that shamed her beyond any punishment a judge could hand down. The details hurt like a slash to the heart, and she would die a thousand deaths before sharing them with Doran.

“I don’t remember,” she told him.

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes, Mr. Spaulding.”

“You have to tell me,” he insisted. “It’s my right as your employer.”

No, it wasn’t. She knew the law. “I made a mistake and I learned from it. I didn’t hurt anyone. That’s what matters.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asked, and swallowed hard enough to shift his Adam’s apple. He almost seemed afraid of her, which couldn’t be right. Nothing scared the Great Doran Spaulding, except closets and possibly the absence of mirrors. “We’ve already established that you’re a liar.”

Solara didn’t want to play this game anymore. She would clean Doran’s suite and fetch his slippers, but she wouldn’t give him a piece of her soul. “If you trust me enough to let me in here, you must know I’m not a threat to you.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“I don’t like talking about it.”

“Fine, then.” He thrust a finger toward the door and ordered, “Get out.”

She drew her eyebrows together. Was he serious or just jerking her around? Sometimes it was hard to tell. “But what about the—”

“I don’t want your help,” he said. “Be at Miss DePaul’s suite before breakfast to tend to that thing she calls a dog. Aside from that, I don’t care what you do.”

Then he stood from his chair and turned off the light in a clear dismissal.

Solara blinked a few times before setting down the tablet and backing out of the room. She returned to her bunk expecting another summons, but she slept undisturbed until the morning alarm rang.

The next day, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, a sort of prickly sensation in her stomach that lingered throughout her morning routine. There was no logical reason for it. The ship traveled smooth and steady, only two hours from the next refueling post. Her roommates smiled and gossiped about their onboard crushes while braiding one another’s hair. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

It wasn’t until she reached Miss DePaul’s suite that Solara realized the cause for her unease. Her wristband had remained silent for too long. Doran hadn’t demanded predawn breakfast in bed. He hadn’t ordered her to warm his bath towels or set the telescreen to his favorite news program. He hadn’t even asked her to pull an outfit from his closet.

That definitely wasn’t normal.

She knocked on Miss DePaul’s door and tried to ignore the worries nibbling at the edge of her mind. The girl answered wearing nothing but Doran’s T-shirt—Solara had laundered it enough times to know. After tucking a gleaming pink lock behind one ear, Miss DePaul hitched a thumb over her shoulder.

“Baby had an accident on the carpet last night. Take care of it before you walk her.” She sniffed a laugh and added, “You can’t miss it. Look for a reeking pile the exact shade of your hair. I’ll be in the shower, so lock the door when you leave.”

In that moment, Solara decided to “forget” locking, or even closing, the door. She cleaned up after the dog, then tucked it gently beneath one arm and carried it to the mezzanine, where passengers brought their animals to exercise. By the time she finished six laps around the artificial park and returned the dog to Miss DePaul, the
Zenith
had stopped to refuel and Doran finally sent instructions to meet him outside the auxiliary engine room.

An odd request, but Solara knew better than to question it.

When she slid open the door to the utility hallway, a chill of foreboding prickled her skin into goose bumps. The passage was empty and cool, illuminated by flickering overhead lights that cast menacing shadows on the floor. All engines had shut down, and without the rhythmic hum, an eerie silence hung in the air. She heard only the creak of her new boots as she strode toward the stairwell to Doran’s meeting place. She saw him in the distance, but he kept his back to her while she climbed the steely stairs. Even when she joined him on the upper platform, he didn’t turn to face her.