CHAPTER 10
lt feels good to be in the chair
again.
We’ve finished
diagnostics and everyone’s on board. Jael is a handsome, cocky
bastard. I don’t know what he’s good for on a ship, but he makes
fine eye candy. And he’s just the type I used to love: slim, blond,
and too pretty for his own good. The way I look now, though, he
spends his time flirting with Dina. He’s more likely to get blood
from a stone than make headway with her.
That stings my
feminine vanity a little. I used to be able to command a man’s
attention by walking into a room. I had an indefinable something.
Now I’m damaged
goods, but it’s enough that March loves me. I don’t care if some
stupid space cowboy can’t appreciate what’s beneath the
surface.
Koratati is . . .
big. She arrived swathed in a gray cloak, and I didn’t get a good
look at her before we came up front. We know she’s nonhuman, so she
might be one of the jumbo races. Surge did right to get her off
planet, as hiding her wouldn’t prove an easy task in Wickville.
Hopefully, she can wedge her ass into the safety harness when we
need to make the jump.
March contacts
docking control on the relay, which crackles in a tinny,
old-fashioned way. After a few minutes, they respond, “You have
clearance, Bernard’s Luck. Have a good
flight.”
Over the rush of the
thrusters, I hear the hangar doors groan their way open. On some
planets, the shipyards are out in the open, but it’s too cold for
that in this part of New Terra. The subzero temps would damage the
instruments if we didn’t keep the ships inside a climate-controlled
hangar.
As always, I admire
March’s skill on the controls, the smooth way we swoop out into the
sky. I know from experience, that isn’t as easy as it looks. As we
gain altitude, I feel it in my eardrums before the pressure inside
the ship stabilizes.
The little Luck shudders as we push past the atmosphere and
into stark, silent reaches where I feel most at home. There’s
nothing like seeing stars through the sensor screen and knowing
only a few centimeters of metal separate you from vacuum. Just
thinking about it sends a thrill through me.
March shakes his head
at me, I hope with affection. “You’re crazy, Jax.”
“I know.”
That’s not the first
time he’s said so. I could counter that he’s mad for loving me, but
that might make him question it. And I don’t want that, even though
I’m afraid of hurting him, afraid of losing him.
Afraid of damn near
everything.
But I refuse to let
it paralyze me. I won’t be the woman who cowers behind four walls,
never taking chances. I want to die like I’ve lived. I always
wanted to be larger than life, but lately it feels like I’m
shrinking—literally, like old women do.
March cuts me a sharp
look—he hates when I think about dying. He says it’s macabre. Well,
the subsequent thought should make him smile because I’m not ready
to go anytime soon, not until I’ve seen more, done more. After this is all over, we’ll spend a
glorious week on the beaches of New Venice, maybe luge down the
glaciers on Ielos. There’s too much left to do for me to want the
ride to end so soon.
“Glad to hear it,” he
says softly. “I’d miss you.”
Understatement. I have no words for the holocaust I
saw inside him when he thought he’d lost me. He went to a place
beyond loss, beyond madness. I don’t deserve him. But I put aside
those thoughts because they make me ache.
He seems a little
tense. The last time March and I left the cockpit, the Folly wound up targeted by New Terra’s Satellite
Defense Installations, and we were lucky to reach the surface in
one piece. I don’t blame him for wanting to make sure we make it to
the first jump intact.
Moreover, we can’t
trust everyone we have on board, so if we leave the cockpit,
there’s a chance that Koratati and Surge will hijack us and deliver
us someplace we don’t want to be. I can’t imagine who else might be
gunning for me—or maybe it’s March they want this time—his past is
far from an open book at this point. Regardless, it seems better to
be safe, which means keeping our asses in these seats.
Dina and Velith will
keep an eye on Surge, Jael, and Koratati for us. And if they start
something, my money’s on Vel. See, I watched him take on a clutch
of Morgut and walk—okay, limp—off to tell the tale.
My fingers go to my
newest scar, a slash across my right wrist. Though it’s healing
well enough, it still itches a little.
March slants me a
smile. “So . . . you wanna play Pick Five?”
I roll my eyes. “Not
really. You’d just read my cards and know what you needed to
discard.”
He lays a hand over
his heart. “I’m cut, seriously. You’re implying I’d cheat?”
“Wouldn’t
you?”
His expression
becomes wolfish. “Absolutely. I always get what I want.”
“Should that worry
me?”
“Everything worries
you.”
I can’t argue that.
He must find me the most ridiculous bundle of contradictions. I
suspect everyone of perfidious motives yet I long to hurl myself
into dangerous situations to forget my fears. Forget aversion
therapy, that’s the way I live.
Apart from the noises
of the ship, it’s so quiet up here. This is what freedom feels
like. In some ways that’s an oxymoron—I’m only free when I’m
confined to a ship as opposed to having a whole planet to move
around on. But there you have it; it’s how I’ve felt since the
first time I went up. My parents took me on a pleasure cruise when
I was thirteen, and I was never the same thereafter.
That line of thought
leads me directly back to my mother. I can’t believe she expects me
to save her ass, after they disowned me. They probably celebrated
when they heard Farwan “brought me to justice.”
“That’s not true,”
March says, unaccountably gentle. “She was happy to see you. More
worried about herself, but genuinely glad you’re all
right.”
I sigh. “Ugh. Don’t
we have enough to worry about without you analyzing my feelings
about my mother?”
“We have time to kill
before we make the jump.” He grins.
“I’d rather play
Charm, New Venice rules.”
“I expect you would.
But think how shocked people would be to find us sexing each other
up in the cockpit, just like the porn cliché.”
A smile tugs at the
corner of my mouth, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. “You
saying you can’t see me naked without being overcome with
lust?”
“Try me.”
I suspect he’s full
of shit, but damned if he’s not good for my ego, which has taken a
beating lately. Most days I don’t even feel womanly, let alone
sexy.
“I think we better
not,” I answer finally. “I don’t want to scare anybody.”
Mainly I’m glad he’s
not bugging me about my mother anymore. That’s where it’s a little
unequal. He knows exactly what he can say without tearing open old
wounds. I don’t have any such clarity where he’s concerned.
Of course I’m curious
about the shit he’s done, the battles he’s fought, and the hell he
went through before he wound up on Lachion with Mair, Keri’s
grandmother. But I don’t want to hurt him—I don’t want to ask about
stuff he’s trying to forget. The old Jax would’ve ranked her
curiosity above any possible harm and called it candor. I’ve since
learned there’s a balance between candor and cruelty.
“You can ask me
anything you want to know,” he says without looking up from the
instruments. His playful mood has faded, though, as if in
anticipation of what I may say.
Okay, then. This is
an olive branch, so I take it. Maybe he wants to open up, but he
doesn’t know where to start. “How many, March?”
He answers without
looking at me. “Body count, you mean?”
I nod, knowing he’ll
catch the movement in his peripheral vision.
“Thousands,” he says,
after a long pause. “On Nicu Tertius alone. I did the job they
hired me for, no matter how bad it got.”
“That was war. That’s
. . . different. And it’s not what I wanted to know.”
“You want to know how
many men I’ve personally ended?” he asks then.
Do I?
“Yeah.”
“Between ten and
fifteen.” He sounds dispassionate. “Depends on whether the ones
whose minds I broke are still lingering.”
“But you had good
reason, right?”
Before he can reply,
Dina’s voice comes over the comm. “I think we have
trouble.”
“When don’t we?”
March mutters. “What’s wrong now?”
“Their jumper seems
to be having a fit, and we don’t have a doc on board.”
