Salvo: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 3) Read online

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Rain was starting to pelt, but she ignored the torrent. She was plucking the bright red orbs out of puddles and muttering to herself in that guttural Tyneali language no one beyond the language wonk Edgar Salehi could ever make much sense of.

  “You’d better help her,” Trigrian shouted.

  “We could just leave them. There are plenty of berry bushes near the main house.”

  “Not like those. Not sure how she knew to look for them, but I’m glad she did. That bush only fruits every other year.” He added, almost bashfully, “I’d be….grateful to have the seeds, Owen.”

  Owen raked a hand through his unkempt curls and swore. “Seriously?”

  Trigrian shrugged behind the windshield and closed the truck door.

  With his plan for a quick escape foiled, Owen got down on his knees and started grabbing berries, red and green. She didn’t seem to be avoiding the green ones specifically, but probably couldn’t see them as well as the red. He guessed that because when she did pick up the green ones, she didn’t toss them back.

  He kept plucking, but she stopped, and looked up at him, canting her head in that odd, birdlike way she always did.

  “Ais,” he snarled. “Maybe you like being rained on, but I don’t. I’d prefer to be dry.”

  “Owen.”

  “Yes. Owen.”

  “Blond.”

  “That’s the only way you can tell us apart?”

  “First can’t see.”

  “You couldn’t see at first, you mean.”

  She nodded and went back to the chore of filling her basket.

  “The next time you decide to go foraging,” he snapped, “you need to let someone know.”

  “Just walk.”

  “Uh-huh. Pay more attention to where you’re walking. That’s Survival 101-level stuff. I get that you grew up kind of cloistered, but if you don’t get up to speed soon, something bad is going to happen to you.”

  “Yes,” she said too blithely.

  “Just yes?” He grabbed her wrists and made her stop plucking berries—made her look at him. “No. You don’t understand, do you? If you pull stunts like this, you’re going to die. Die. You know that word, right?”

  She jerked back from him, but she couldn’t get far because his grip was too sure.

  He didn’t let go. He needed to make her understand. No one on that farm had time to be teaching her lessons she should have learned by the age of six. They watched each other’s backs and cooperated as much as they could stand, but everyone needed to be smart and autonomous. Or at the very least, just not completely reckless.

  Ais was behind the curve. She needed to be babysat, and no one had signed up for that job.

  “You don’t leave the farm,” he said. “Understand?”

  Her cheeks flooded that unnatural crimson color, and her eyes went watery.

  Jesus.

  He let go of her and grabbed the handle of the basket. “Screw the rest of them.”

  When she made no motion to get up, he backtracked, pulled her up by the hand, and got her moving toward the truck.

  He didn’t bother opening the passenger door for her. She wasn’t going to get in beside Trigrian. Owen opened the tailgate, pushed the basket into the bed, and helped Ais up afterward.

  Because he wasn’t a complete asshole, he climbed up with her. Then, he knocked on the top of the truck to get Trigrian moving, and rooted into the mounted storage box for the oilcloth tarp he was reasonably certain was stored in there. Finding the tarp, he draped it over her head, pushed her damned basket beneath the makeshift tent, and then pressed his back to the corner farthest from her. If he were very still, he wouldn’t get too wet, and if he didn’t get too wet, his already sour mood wouldn’t hit rock bottom. His sisters had been increasingly vocal about his poor mood as of late, and he was tired of having to defend his right to just be an asshole sometimes.

  “Suck it up, buttercup,” Court kept saying, but even she was giving up. She’d taken to barring him from having meals at the main house whenever his tone was too unpleasant.

  He was getting to that place. He knew it.

  He planned to seclude later—after he’d filled his belly and had a hot shower—and for as many days as he possibly could.

  If he were lucky, he wouldn’t have to leave the hunter’s cottage to fix the perimeter sensor wires. He wouldn’t get called into Little Gitano to fix the bootlegged communications equipment at the meet-shop. His mother wouldn’t call from Earth asking him how he felt all the goddamned time.

  He wouldn’t have to go out hunting for pretty little blind fools who weren’t smart enough to stay at home when they didn’t know the weather or the terrain.

  That would suit him immensely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sitting cross-legged in the corner of the warm farmhouse kitchen, Ais did her best to separate berries. The red ones were easy enough to see. Those, she put into a bowl for Murki. Courtney had said that Murki’s family did good trade of berry dye before the Terrans took Jekh. Curious, Ais had looked up the berries in the computer’s Jekh information database. The pigment those red berries made was saturated, permanent, and also very expensive.

  She actually hadn’t gone out looking for them during her walk. The sun had been shining, or at least she’d assumed it was given the warmth on her face when she’d stepped outside. She’d wanted some fresh air and to stretch her limbs. Always looking to make her careful walks more industrious, she’d grabbed a basket so she could gather flowers to give to Courtney. There was so little Ais could do to thank her for being such a fine hostess, but Courtney’s voice always went light and happy when people gave her flowers.

  Ais hadn’t found any flowers during her walk. The season for them may have passed, or perhaps they’d all been destroyed during the last rain. She’d kept walking, anyway, curious about the path she’d been on. The mountain was upon her before she could realize how far she’d gone. The bright red of the berries up on the ledge had caught her attention.

  She picked up one of the tender orbs and tracked it past her eyes.

  Green?

  She couldn’t see green well, except in her periphery.

  “Green for seeds,” she said to Courtney, who’d quietly entered the room. “Dry first. Yellow, no good.”

  “Ah. Don’t worry about yellows. You don’t have any.”

  “Oh, good.” Knowing that would make sorting exponentially faster.

  Courtney knelt down in front of her, forearms draped over her thighs, and pregnant belly jutting between. She was having her second baby—a little boy to be half-brother to her daughter Kerry.

  Sweet, precious girl.

  Ais smiled thinking of the toddler. There weren’t any children in the space station lab Ais had been raised on…at least, not since she’d stopped being a child herself, and she wasn’t quite sure when that was.

  She loved seeing children. They hinted that life on Jekh was far more normal than what she’d been familiar with, even if Jekh wasn’t as normal as the natives would have liked. There were still too many Terrans on the planet for that, not that all Terrans were bad. Just the ones who took.

  “The bathing room is empty for whenever you’re ready.” Courtney extended a hand to Ais’s face, and deftly plucked something from Ais’s hair. She tossed whatever it was into the trashcan Ais had earlier pulled close. “I had to threaten a lot of folks with promises of brutal beatings to keep them out of the space for the next couple of hours.”

  Ais nodded, and tried not to smile at such a thing. Her sense of humor was probably quite poor, but she always thought Courtney was funny when she was surly.

  “How are your hands?” Courtney asked.

  Ais tossed a shriveled red berry into the bowl and then turned her palms over. “Look?”

  “Hmm.” Courtney took Ais’s hands in hers and gently ran the pads of her thumbs across the palms. “You’ll have some blisters. That’s unavoida
ble. Also, your nails are pretty torn up. Can’t feel the pain?”

  “No. Feel…nothing.” Ais shrugged.

  Ais had hidden when the doctor had arrived to look at her, but he’d left her good drugs, anyway. The fact she was upright after having sipped the painkiller was a small miracle. If she moved her head too fast, she would have toppled over for sure. Once her face hit the floor, she doubted she’d get back up. At least the tile floor was cool, though. She’d probably sleep quite comfortably there.

  “I’ll finish sorting the berries,” Courtney said. “Go have your bath.”

  “But…is Ais work.”

  “Go. I can finish quickly. Trust me. I used to sort beans for my grandmother when I was a kid. I can even use two hands at once.”

  Ais furrowed her brow. She didn’t want to leave the work to Courtney. Courtney already had too much work to do, even if there were only a handful left to sort. Still, arguing with Courtney always ended fruitlessly, so for once, Ais decided to save her energy. She grabbed the ledge of the counter and pulled herself up.

  “What were you going to do with them?” Courtney asked. She held up one red sphere.

  “Oh. For Murki. And Trigrian.”

  “Why?”

  “Said good money.”

  Ais couldn’t be quite sure, but she thought Courtney’s mouth slanted into a grin. “You never forget anything, do you?”

  Ais shrugged again. She remembered trifling things because she didn’t have very many memories otherwise. Most of her life up until three months prior had been in the same three rooms. She’d been kidnapped from the lab by a Terran man named Reg Devin, which she’d found exciting at first, but he’d been mean. He’d kept her in a box in his parked spaceship, only taking her out when he was in a certain mood, and then he’d play with her. She didn’t understand the strange things he’d had her do—the places he’d made her put her hands and mouth—but when she complied, he didn’t beat her. Reg had taught her so many new sensations. Most of them hurt.

  Eileen had rescued her. Eileen and Edgar. They were nice. They hadn’t hurt her.

  “Are you going to need help?” Courtney asked. “I don’t want to send you to the bath only for you to nod off and drown.”

  “Oh.” Ais rubbed her chest just over her heart and furrowed her brow. She hadn’t considered such a thing, but passing out and drowning was certainly within the realm of possibility. “Don’t know?”

  “I would tell you to shower instead, but we’ve got to do something with your hair.”

  Ais put a hand to the newly shortened part and cringed at the unevenness. “He cut.”

  Owen had cut her hair with his big knife. She was glad she hadn’t been able to see or she would have cried out for sure, and he would have been angry with her.

  “Yeah,” Courtney said. “Hair grows back, though. You’ve never had yours cut, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want yours so long? I’ve seen you eying Erin’s short crop a lot.”

  “Hmm. Is pretty, but has curls.” Ais didn’t have curls.

  “I think yours is still long enough on that side to pull back into a braid,” Courtney said. “Maybe if we just cut some layers into both sides to make them even, that’ll buy you some time to decide if you want to do anything else.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool.”

  “I bathe.” Ais closed her eyes and patted in her mind for good-enough English vocabulary. Her thoughts tended to be in Tyneali. She understood English and Jekhan well enough when they were spoken to her, but she had a hard time recalling all the words when she needed to regurgitate them. “I bathe Ais.”

  “You sure you’ll be okay alone?”

  Ais nodded. “Will short.”

  “You’ll take a short bath, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. I’m going to check on you every five minutes until you get out. You can have privacy when you’re not high on the doctor’s wicked brew.”

  “Yes.” Ais giggled. High sounded about right. She felt as though she were only being tethered to the ground by a flimsy string and if someone were to snip the line, she’d float away.

  Courtney escorted Ais to the bathing room, and after stacking some white stools on the bench near the pumps, closed the door behind her.

  The stone room was dim and quiet other than for the low hum of the motors that kept the spacious bathing pool clean and warm.

  Ais followed the sound of the buzz, tilting an ear toward the pumps and using her hand to keep her close to the wall as she moved. Her favorite seat was just by the water return. The water was warmest there.

  She hummed a fractured melody as she moved through the space. Occasionally, she stopped to tap the side of her foot against the tub ledge to gauge her nearness. The room was so dim, but a bit more light probably wouldn’t have mattered much. All of the tiles on the floor, walls, and ceiling were the same color and the planes blurred together for her at times. The range of colors she could see was limited, and not in any sensible way according to Doctor Dorro. The Tyneali at the lab were supposed to have fixed her when they fixed the color of her eyes, too. Her eyes were supposed to be some shade of brown, they’d told her. They didn’t understand what they’d done wrong. They’d apparently misjudged something in the human bits of her.

  Finding the handrail, she slowly sank onto her knees and then swirled her fingers through the forceful gust of warm water from the pipe. She couldn’t feel the aches from the cuts that were on her skin, but still, her flesh buzzed. She was eager to soak the pain away before the painkiller wore off.

  She hummed again as she tugged the tie of her dress at the back of her neck, filling in the gaps in the song with improvised noises. She only knew the one song, and didn’t know that one well. The Tyneali didn’t have art or music. They didn’t understand the point, really, of creating things that weren’t alive or that didn’t service people in some way. Ais hadn’t understood either, at first. She’d assumed that everything was supposed to have a use—a purpose. But on Jekh, art was always around in small ways. Sometimes, art was only there to make someone pause so they could think or smile. But art could also be functional. Even simple things like the tiles that held hot pots on the dinner table were lovely. The knitted blankets that Mrs. McGarry held up during her frequent COM transmissions were not only useful, but pretty—made especially for her grandchildren. Their artistry meant she cared. And the McGarry women…they sang, badly sometimes, but that was fun because they didn’t care. Their joy was infectious.

  Ais had never seen unbridled emotion like that before. That was why she hadn’t understood the point of art. She’d learned quickly.

  She wanted to make things, too. She just didn’t know what yet.

  She let her dress fall to her ankles and stepped out of her underclothes. Running her fingertips over the bodice of the dress, she felt for rips and tears, cringing at the larger ones, sighing at the huge gapes. She couldn’t tell if the dress could be repaired, and she hated to ask for the help, but dresses with that much fabric couldn’t have been cheap. Courtney and Erin had Ais’s dress specially made to fit by some kind woman in Little Gitano. Owen had seemed especially putout by all the fuss and had left the house, frustrated, when Courtney insisted she put in the order.

  Owen was always so angry at Ais. She didn’t know why. Reg was far easier to figure out.

  “You doing all right?” came Courtney’s voice from the doorway.

  “Not in,” Ais said.

  “Want some help? I’d forgotten how dim this room is. Can you even see anything?”

  “Little. Help, please.”

  Ais loved long soaks as much as any hybrid on Jekh, but efficiency seemed wiser at the moment. She wanted to go to bed and sleep and forget the stupid thing she’d done. “Silly little fool,” Owen had called her. She was one. She knew. By morning, she hoped to feel less embarrassed.

  At Courtney’s gentle tug of her arm, Ais gripped the railing and de
scended to the higher bench. There, she sat, and Courtney tended to her hair and gently cleansed Ais’s bruises and cuts.

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” Courtney said quietly as she flicked a twig or other detritus out of Ais’s tangled hair.

  “Tell what?”

  “We don’t like keeping things from you. So many of us to know what’s happening, and you don’t. That’s not fair if everyone knows but you. Me and Erin, and Granddad, plus Lillian, Eileen, Edgar…”

  And Owen.

  Ais sighed and lowered her head at Courtney’s gentle, forward nudge. There was matted hair at her nape, apparently. “Tell.”

  “I don’t want stress you out. You always act like these things are your fault, but you didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “What this?” Ais cringed at the tug of the knot, and wondered if maybe she really should cut her hair like Erin. She wouldn’t be as pretty, but she’d have less trouble.

  “I’ll try to use as few words as possible,” Courtney said. “But I’ll start with these. “Erin talked to Headron earlier.”

  “Yes?” Headron was one of Erin’s lovers. Jekhan women always had two. Erin wasn’t Jekhan, of course, but her men didn’t care. Ais hated to think such a way, but she was glad there was one fewer Jekhan male around the farm. She didn’t like being so skittish around them, but that was how the Tyneali had conditioned her. They’d told her that Jekhan men were dangerous.

  She wasn’t so sure of that anymore.

  “He finally found his uncle,” Courtney said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yep. Erin said he was very excited, and of course, she is, too. Headron’s been gone for a couple of months. Headron’s on the way back with him, along with Edgar. Edgar said Lillian passed along some news.”

  “Oh no.” Ais slumped.

  Lillian’s news was always bad for Ais. The city of Buinet’s police commissioner had ways of getting information that no one else on the planet did. She’d been looking into Ais’s origins. She probably knew more about Ais than Ais did. The Tyneali in the lab hadn’t talked to her about what, or who, she was, but Lillian had other means of research.

  “Don’t freak out too much.” Courtney tossed the comb she’d been using to the side and then smoothed something creamy through Ais’s tattered locks. “With a good night’s sleep, none of this will seem like a big deal.”