The New Space Opera 2 (23 page)

She felt cold. “Are you allowed to act on them?”

“We're talking about what happened at Lysvista,” he said, “not about me. And what happened at Lysvista convinced you that you had picked the wrong side. That's why you didn't complete your mission.”

Her mouth was dry. She had to focus on the muscles of her hand so that she wouldn't squeeze Misha's fingers too hard.

“You've been bought,” she said.

“Of course not,” the Director said. “Although I do keep an eye out—for all sides. I don't choose. If I choose, I lose money.”

He was selling information, the son of a bitch. How many people had she met who were just like him? How many had she used?

She swallowed hard so that she wouldn't alienate him further. “Who did you tell I was here?”

“No one yet,” he said. “That's the interesting part, at least to me. I've told no one. I didn't know it was you, until you identified yourself as you went into the ship.”

So, if she believed him, he had had nothing to do with the murders on board the cruise ship, not even peripherally, as a seller of information.

But he could sell that information now—and they both knew it.

“What do you want?” she asked, but she knew. He wanted money.

He waited. He wanted her to name a price.

She wouldn't.

“No one can come here and get me,” she said. “You'd have to ship me to them. You would lose your job if anyone found out what you had done.”

“No one would find out.”

She smiled. “You think I haven't figured out how people like you survive? If I leave, a message will go to your boss. In it will be information on all of the people you've sold both to Kazen and to Nechev.”

He didn't move his body. But his mouth slackened, just enough to let her know that she had him.

Her bluff was working.

She was careful not to take it too far. That simple threat would be enough to hold him.

Finally, he said, “I could still tell Kazen Intelligence where you are.”

At that moment, she knew she had him. He wouldn't ask for money, nor would he get in her way.

“They already know where I am,” she said. She waved a hand at Misha. “Or he wouldn't be here, not like this.”

She didn't know that for certain; the killer on that ship could have been anyone, or after anyone. She had no idea. And even if the killer had targeted her by attacking her family, she couldn't be certain it was Kazen Intelligence.

But she didn't let that uncertainty show on her face.

“You're not afraid they'll come for you?” the Director asked.

“I'm not afraid of anything.” And as she spoke, she realized that was true. She wasn't afraid of anything. Not of dying, not even of Misha's death. His death would hurt, yes, but it wouldn't devastate her.

She hadn't been close enough to him to feel such a comprehensive loss.

Yet she had run across the starbase like a mad thing, trying to save his life. Love? Or guilt? Or simply an old, nearly dormant sense of maternal duty?

“You're not even afraid they'll hurt your boy?” the Director asked.

“They've already hurt my boy,” she said.

The Director stared at her.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell them where I am. Sell that information if you want. Send them after me. But do me one favor.”

The Director looked at her, his hand falling to his side.

She met his gaze. “Leave me alone.”

His expression hardened. He glared at her for a moment, then he pushed away from the wall and stalked out of the room.

Only after he had gone did she realize she should have told him to leave Misha alone as well.

 

After that, no one came for her. No one contacted her. No one threatened her.

She got the message: she was safe so long as she stayed in the NetherRealm.

She knew she was being watched. But as long as she remained inactive, she was a threat to no one.

If she approached any other side, if she promised secrets for sale, if she offered her services to any one of a hundred underground organizations, then someone would retaliate. Then she might die.

Or Misha might.

She still hadn't figured out how to protect him.

She stayed at his side, leaving only once to get her clothes and the contents of her paid room. She brought them to his bedside after being gone only an hour, an hour in which she had to hope no one would touch him.

The nurses monitored him with their equipment, not realizing that she had sealed his room. No one could have gotten in, even if they wanted to.

It had been a risk: if he had had an actual emergency, no one would have been able to save him.

But he hadn't. He was as oblivious to her when she got back as he had been when she left.

Still, she felt something akin to relief that he was all right. She couldn't say that it
was
relief, however, because she would have thought relief to be much more intense.

On the third day, she remembered that she used to watch him sleep. He had been so small then. She had stood beside his crib, watching his little rib cage go up and down with each breath, his little hand cupped around a stuffed dog Yuri had given him.

Then each breath brought relief. Real relief. Something that precious could breathe only a few meters away from her, without her help.

As she sat beside him now, watching him take each breath, she couldn't remember how it felt to worry about him so. She could remember worrying, but as an intellectual exercise, not as a visceral one.

Yet she remained beside him now, protecting him while he couldn't protect himself.

 

On the fifth day he woke up.

The transition was not as slow as the doctors had told her it would be. One minute he was unconscious, the next he was staring at her.

There was no warmth in his gaze.

“Mother?” he asked as if he wasn't sure.

She nodded.

They stared at each other for a long moment. She waited for the relief to come, but it didn't. Part of her—the practical part—knew it would have been better for both of them if he hadn't survived.

“Where's Dad?” Misha asked.

She bit her lower lip. She had hoped he would remember this. The investigators said that Misha had probably been shot last. He would have seen his father die.

“Where is he?” Misha asked.

Now there was tension in his tone. Maybe the memory
was
coming back.

“Your father didn't make it,” she said softly.

She had practiced that line in her head, but it didn't sound as compassionate as she wanted it to.

“He's dead?” Misha's voice wobbled.

She nodded.

“How?”

She frowned. “Don't you remember?”

Misha blinked, then lifted his hand, the one she had been holding. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head slightly, then let his hand drop.

“He said, ‘Tell the bitch she's a walking corpse.'” The wobble in Misha's voice grew worse.

She frowned. “Who said that? Your father?”

It didn't sound like Yuri. But then, she hadn't paid attention to Yuri in years.

Misha shook his head. “The man. The man with the laser rifle. His name was—Geninka?—something like that. He'd been friendly until then.”

Because that was how they were trained. Get close, pretend friendship, then pull off the mask. Shock the subject, especially if they needed to deliver a message.

She let out a small breath. So Misha wasn't supposed to die. He'd been placed in front of the door, in the hopes that he would awaken when the ship landed, and let himself out.

Which meant that this Geninka—obviously not his real name—had followed procedure.

“He shot you first,” she said.

It was not a guess. The target, the one who was to live to deliver the message, always got shot first. That would be the most careful shot, the one guaranteed to injure the subject, maybe even render him unconscious, and then quickly take out everyone else.

“He stood up and said, ‘Tell the bitch…' and then he pointed the rifle at me, and Dad shouted and someone reached for it, and…” Misha shook his head. “I don't remember any more.”

She glanced at the door, expecting someone to come in, to tell her not to agitate him. But no one came. They didn't even seem to know he was awake.

She thought they had been monitoring him.

“Dad was heading toward him. Dad would have stopped him, right? Dad was pretty strong…” A slight frown creased the skin between Misha's eyes. He might have remembered more, but she wasn't going to push him.

“You're the only survivor,” she said, trying to soften her tone even more.

“The…only…?” The frown deepened. “So the shooter, Geninka, whatever his name was, he's dead too?”

“Probably not,” she said. “But we didn't know who he was until now.”

“Are you going to kill him?” Misha asked.

The question surprised her. She had no idea he understood exactly what she did.

Everyone expected her to go after the killer. It was what she would have done six months before.

But the boy in front of her changed that.

His message changed it too.

He hadn't indicated that he knew the message was for her, but she knew that it had been.

They had targeted her family. They would target her, but they wouldn't kill her. They would maim her, make it impossible for her to survive on her own.

For someone as completely independent as she was, such a punishment would be a lot worse than dying.

She put her hand on his. His skin was clammy, just like it had been before.

She wasn't going to answer his question, maybe not ever.

Instead, she said, “I need to get someone here to tend to you,” and she walked to the door.

 

He was going to live.

He would have no lasting physical damage—not even scarring, since she opted to have that removed, without even giving him permission to make his own decision.

She was in awe of all the kinds of things she could decide for him without even telling him; she'd never really thought of parental prerogatives before, and how they rendered a child—even a child on the cusp of his teenage years—helpless in the face of whatever the parent wanted.

She didn't have to consult him on anything. She could have chosen anything for him.

And it tempted her. He was a burden she didn't need, especially now that she was going to have to look over her shoulder, maybe for the rest of her life.

She might have felt differently if she had raised him. But she couldn't remember the last time she had seen him. She knew the date of the last visit, but she couldn't remember the actual good-bye.

If she were honest with herself, that good-bye had probably occurred while she was already thinking of her next mission. Her body had been beside the boy, but her mind had already been far away.

While he slept and healed, she researched. It wouldn't take much to get him new identification. She could find him caretakers. He even had
grandparents somewhere—Yuri's parents, not hers—who might be willing to take him on. She found cousins, aunts, and—even better—Yuri's will, filed with some easy-access legal service.

Yuri had assumed she would be unavailable and impossible to contact. He had set up a close friend as Misha's legal guardian.

When she found that, she stood beside Misha's hospital bed and watched him sleep. His cheeks had color now and his eyes no longer sank into his skull.

Her parents had died when she was ten. Her grandparents didn't want her—they claimed they were too old to raise a child. She had no other relatives, so the government sent her to a camp where they tested her and figured out her skills.

Then they sent her to Chuleart, to a special school there. She graduated at the top of her class, because she had no distractions. All she did was study, which got her into Chuleart's acclaimed university.

Where she met Yuri, her first—and, realistically, her only—distraction.

Later, she learned the techniques: loss, abandonment, distancing, lack of emotional attachment, and lack of interpersonal warmth created an adult who could not form healthy relationships. An adult who, if she was mentally tough enough to survive the loneliness and despair, not only couldn't form relationships but didn't understand them.

If his grandparents and family didn't want him, if Yuri's friend was mean or distant, Misha would grow up to become someone just like her. Someone who lived for the moment, the job, the day-to-day, professing an intellectual understanding of what she did and why she did it, but not an emotional one.

Not even when she cradled a baby in her arms, a baby who pulled her hair and stared at her from eyes that matched hers in their icy blueness, had she formed an emotional attachment.

At least not one she could remember.

She slipped into the chair she had lived in for the past week. Misha's hands were under the thin covers. His foot peeked out of the bottom of the bed.

She didn't adjust the covers like she had seen Yuri do so many times.

She barely touched the boy now that he was awake.

She couldn't raise the son that Yuri could. She couldn't raise a bright, warm, loved child, one who would go on to do great things as well as raise a family of his own, a family he would love.

But she could keep him alive.

And she doubted that his grandparents or his extended family or even this unknown friend of Yuri's could do that. She had planned to give the boy a choice in his own future, but now she wasn't going to.

He was going to come with her, whether he liked it or not.

 

“Are you going to let him get away with it?” Misha asked as they packed up his hospital room two days later. He moved like an old man. Laser rifle burns, like the ones he had sustained, severed muscle and ruined tissue. Even with the repair and regrowth, the muscles were weak, the tissue sensitive.