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

  Tugging her arm ineffectually, she snapped at him, “Where take?”

  “Told you I was going to move you. Now’s a good time.”

  She tried to pull away from him, and craned her neck to see over her shoulder, hoping to see the familiar shape of anyone with some sympathy for her, but her champions must have all been in the kitchen. Given the fast clip at which Owen was tugging her along, she didn’t think crying out for help would do her any good, but she tried anyway. “Court—”

  Owen clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t bother. This is between you and me, understand? As far as anyone else knows, you volunteered to move.”

  Ais growled behind his palm, but that didn’t give her the satisfaction she craved, so she bit down on the flesh.

  “Goddammit.”

  He stopped, spun around, and hauled her up onto his shoulder. “You would have been so much happier if you’d made this easy for yourself.”

  “No easy! Easy for you.”

  He tromped more than walked, every bump jostling her hips and ribs and aggravating her wounded skin, but in spite of her whimpering, he obviously didn’t care. He didn’t slow, didn’t adjust his punishing grip on her thighs, didn’t apologize.

  She pounded his back, anyway. “Put down.”

  “You had your chance to walk.”

  “Bad as Reg.”

  That made Owen stop, but only briefly. Whatever he thought of the criticism, he didn’t speak the words. He started walking again, and then blessedly kept his mouth shut until they arrived at the hunter’s cottage.

  He dumped her unceremoniously onto some soft surface—his bed, she realized with some squinting and patting. His bed was larger than hers, perhaps twice the size and built for a Jekhan man rather than a growing child.

  He left the sack of her belongings near her feet.

  As he moved away, she thought he’d abandon her in yet another room without care, but he lingered. In the small kitchen space, he lifted lids and clattered plates together. After minutes of that unholy noise, he carried over a tray bearing what Ais quickly made out as typical farm-stuffs. Jekhan bread made by Headron before he’d left for his trip, a smear of some of the butter Esteben had traded for the last time he’d been home, a couple of spheres of homegrown fruit, and a small cup of tea.

  Three hours sooner, and the tiny meal might have been enough.

  She hoped the scolding look she pointed at him was eloquent enough, but she couldn’t see him well enough to assess his reaction. The cottage needed more light, and too much of his face was masked by shadow.

  “When lunch is ready,” he said, “I’ll bring some out.”

  “Late by hours.”

  He shrugged. “Busy.”

  She scoffed. “Mean.”

  “Feel good to call me that? Fine. Maybe one day you’ll understand that I’m trying to help you out, and that me doing this was for the best.”

  He set the tray beside her on the bed and retreated to the small kitchen once more.

  She glowered at his back and wished she could punch him with her stare. One punch for every tear she’d shed seemed a reasonable prescription. Unfortunately, there was no so such magic.

  “If you want something to do, there’s a tablet near the bed that has e-books and films.”

  She said nothing. She’d occupy herself in the matter she saw fit, in spite of what he said. Pinching a corner of bread between her fingers and grinding her teeth, she stared into her teacup.

  “The windows are open at the tops,” he said, “but I doubt even someone as small as you could snake through.”

  “I your captive?” She was beginning to think she’d been right about him being like Reg. Reg had wanted to tether her to a small room, too. He’d made plenty of promises to return to give her food or let her bathe, and then he stopped promising because they both knew he was lying.

  “If you need to communicate with me for some reason, you can send a message to my wrist COM through the tablet. Mine is the only device you’ll be able to connect to, by the way.”

  Bastard.

  “You lock door,” she said.

  “I’ll try to be mindful of the hour so you get lunch on time.”

  “Want out.”

  “If my scent on the bedding disturbs you, feel free to change the sheets. I didn’t have time. The sheets are in the chest at the foot of the bed. If you can’t see well enough to change them, I’ll do it when I get back. There’s cold water here in this container. Tends to be dry in here.”

  He set a decanter of some sort on the small table next to the bed, and too close to her.

  She picked the bottle up, found the cap with her thumb on the first try, opened the lid, and tossed the contents of the bottle into his face.

  She moved quickly, then, cowering in the corner of the bed, covering her face and drawing her limbs in tightly against her curled body, and then she waited.

  The strike she’d expected didn’t come, nor did the strident words.

  He just breathed short, ragged breaths.

  She felt the weight of him pressing onto the bed, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention as he leaned in closer.

  “Well, aren’t you a scrappy little thing?” His voice was nearly a whisper. Flat, but somehow seductive, though seduction was certainly not his intent. Nor had she any business being seduced.

  Persevere.

  “Is that natural or something the Tyneali bred into you?” he asked. “I thought they liked their experiments to be a little more passive.”

  She swallowed and pressed her top teeth into her lower lip. They did. The Tyneali wanted their creations to be calm, even-tempered, and unwilling to put up a fight because they thought intelligence almost always won out over force, but they didn’t understand humans. There was no one gene for the Tyneali to turn off that would deactivate the urge to be free on one’s own terms. Perhaps they’d bred compliance successfully into much of the Jekhan population, but probably not to the degree they hoped for. Mr. McGarry had speculated that most Jekhans just “went along with the program.” They pretended to fit in to some artificial construct of what a Jekhan was supposed to be like. He thought that there were many who weren’t as passive as they acted but, like Ais, they’d been conditioned well enough to know they shouldn’t act on their compulsions.

  She peeked from behind her arms and watched Owen rake a hand down his face.

  “The bathroom door is near the kitchen,” came the same neutral tone. “Look near the dark blue door. The toilet and sink work fine, but there’s no tub here, and the shower’s not working right now. I’ll fix the drain later. I have to go into Little Gitano to get some plumbing parts.”

  “Go.”

  “I don’t need your permission, Ais, but I am leaving. I’m being rude to my guests.”

  The guests she couldn’t even see.

  Do they know I’m here?

  “You hide Ais, like Tyneali. Like Reg.”

  He gave a forceful expulsion of air and paced a bit. “Not hidden, Ais. Everyone knows you’re around. You gave up your bed for Precious so she could be in the house near her brothers, and you’re here where it’s quiet so you can sleep and recover.”

  “You lie.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes you have to tell a few fibs to spare silly little fools who make bad decisions some embarrassment.”

  She snatched up a piece of fruit and squeezed it in her fist. Briefly, she considered throwing the pulp at his face, but the fruit was ripe and would be sweet, and she was hungry. She’d gone hungry for days at a time when Reg had held her captive, and she’d learned to never squander an opportunity to eat. Waste for so many people on Jekh meant death.

  “I’ll be back in a few hours.” He eased away from the bed and moved to the door, jangling his keys.

  She offered no retort because her mouth was full of fruit, and that was just as well. The insufferable man probably wouldn’t have cared if she said anything, anyway.

  CHA
PTER FIVE

  The moment Owen returned to the farmhouse, with a gut weighted heavy with guilt, he headed to the kitchen in search of Trigrian. Turning back to the cottage and apologizing for his rudeness should have been his obvious next step, but he really did have so many things to do and people to manage.

  He didn’t know what had gotten into him. In spite of what his sister had insinuated, he’d never treated a woman with such crudeness. He’d thought he’d tempered his attitude prior to fetching her, but then he’d looked at her and those scrapes on her pretty face. She’d gotten them doing something that would have been just as foolish for a woman with perfect vision. Not even Court would have gone tromping through the backcountry alone, and Court was the sort of woman who believed pissing out of the side window of a moving hover-flyer was a perfectly reasonable timesaving measure.

  He dragged his palm down his face and blew out a breath. “Trig,” he said on approach, ignoring his sister leaning against the counter and the others who were mingling in the room. He didn’t even look to see who was in there.

  The Jekhan man was half under the kitchen sink, fidgeting with the newly installed garbage disposal. “Can you drive me into town before lunch? I need to try to find parts to fix the shower in the hunter’s cottage.”

  Court, who’d been watching Trig with her fingers entwined atop her big belly, cocked up an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you’re even asking. I figured you and Luke would hole up somewhere and plot dangerous things without any input from your smarter little sisters.”

  Precious, who must have been drawn into the room by some sort of warped ESP, scraped her dark hair back from her kohl-rimmed eyes, jammed her baseball cap down over the mop, and cackled. “Let them plot all they want to, Court. All that time we were in the ship, I barely got a wink of sleep. Yo, I’m tired as fuck. Maybe if we’d had a few more weeks onboard, my body would have adjusted to the conditions, but right now, I’m paying the price.”

  “So, you’re bailing on us, is what you’re saying.” Luke was at the long, wide farm table stuffing his face with delicate Jekhan pastries. Headron made approximately one ton at a time and froze them, though with the farm’s population swelling so rapidly, the stockpile rarely lasted more than a couple of weeks.

  “Look, I’m just gonna take a nap, is all.”

  Eileen, who must have followed Precious into the room, winced. “Yeah, no. Honey, I was a shuttle attendant up until the Buinet Riots pinched off any opportunity for me to get a commercial flight off this rock. The first couple of trips I took—and those were slow shuttle trips of about seven months—the travel hammered me. Amy covered my ass and I covered hers until we learned the recovery tricks.”

  “Mmmhmm, sure did,” Amy said. She was perched on a stool at the end of the counter holding a teacup, and Fastida leaned nearby as always. Where there was Amy, there was almost always Fastida. Fastida had apparently never had female friends before Amy. “You can fool the body into thinking you’re on solid ground,” Amy said, “but you’ll still hurt for a few weeks. Headaches. Body aches. Miserable.”

  “Shit, you mean I’m gonna fuckin’ hurt worse?” Precious whined. She was beautiful, even when she pouted, but she had a vocabulary like her brothers. Around her mother, she pretended otherwise.

  “Such a good girl, my Precious,” Mrs. Cipriani always said, and none of the kids ever corrected her. They figured they might as well leave the lady to her delusions.

  “So what’s that mean for me?” Precious asked. “Lay everything out so I can prepare. I complain less when I’m prepared.”

  “Yeah, right,” Luke muttered.

  Precious narrowed her eyes at him.

  Eileen snorted. “You’re screwed, honey, but don’t worry. Your brothers might look bright-eyed and bushy tailed right now, but give them a few hours. They’ll be wishing they hadn’t teased you.”

  “Oh, good,” Precious said. “Then I won’t miss anything.”

  “You’re not going to miss anything anyway,” Eileen said. “We’re pretty much in a holding pattern around here until Edgar gets back with Headron and his uncle.”

  “What’ll happen after that?” Luke asked.

  “I leave with Edgar and whoever else we can strong-arm into the mission.”

  “On your hunt for the missing Jekhan women.”

  “Yep. You catch on fast, kid.”

  If Luke had possessed feathers, he might have been fluffing them at the moment. His know-it-all grin made up for his lack of plumage, however. “I was always the smartest kid on the block.”

  Owen rolled his eyes. “In addition to an overdeveloped ego, you always had a knack for exaggeration,” he muttered.

  “If you’d like,” Luke said, ignoring his quip, “maybe Owen and I can tail you in my new ride.”

  The last time Luke had uttered a similar statement, Owen and his brother Ian had ended up handcuffed to a banister at their neighborhood’s police precinct, and Luke had been nowhere to be found.

  “Slippery bastard,” Owen said under his breath.

  “Hey,” Luke said, cocking one of his dark eyebrows. “I resemble that remark.”

  “You should, given how many times you left me in the lurch.”

  “None of those charges stuck, though. My father made sure of that.”

  “Yeah, and my father wanted to send me to military school.”

  “Fortunately for you, no one would have you,” Court said.

  He would have given his little sister the finger, but she picked that exact moment to turn her back.

  Precious put her head down on the table and sighed. “You know, back in Boston when people stole cars, they’d at least strip them for parts if they didn’t want to be caught.”

  “Why waste a perfectly good spaceship?” Luke asked.

  “Because the one you stole is exceedingly discoverable?” Owen suggested.

  Luke scoffed and swatted the air. “Come on. That ship is one of a kind, and they don’t have anything else in their fleet nearly as fast. By the time anyone on Earth with the right security level catches up to me, I’ll have that thing hidden so well that even oxygen wouldn’t be able to find it.”

  Shaking her head, Court ambled to the table, then gave Precious’s shoulder a tap. “Come on. Go get a couple hours of sleep before lunch. We’ll try to get your body clock to reset in the next couple of days. Your idiot brothers can fend for themselves.”

  “Idiot, Court?” Marco feigned insult, putting a hand over his heart and letting his jaw fall.

  “She knows you too well, meathead.” Precious stood, stretched her arms overhead, and writhed until a pop sounded from her spine.

  Owen cringed.

  “Ah, there goes the crack. Who needs a chiropractor, anyway?”

  “Ugh.” Fastida shuddered. “That sound always curdles my blood. There was a woman in prison with me and Mother who was always cracking her knuckles and wrists. I developed a tic and would want to strangle her every time she popped something.”

  Precious pushed one dark eyebrow up and gave Fastida an assessing look. “Prison?”

  “Yes. That’s where many Jekhan women were held. The ones who weren’t disappeared, anyway. Mother and I had been in prison for years in Buinet before Courtney, Owen, and Trigrian sprung us during the riots.”

  “What’d you do to get locked up?”

  Fastida blew a raspberry. “Who the hell can even say at the point? Perhaps I breathed or blinked or something.” She narrowed her eyes and tapped her chin. “Or maybe I just wasn’t pretty enough to be made a whore.”

  There was a collective groan from the room. Whenever Fastida got started with her pity parties, few things could wind her down.

  “Jeez, lady,” Precious said with a laugh. “Do you need a nap, too?”

  “Oh, she’s always like that,” Amy said dismissively.

  “So ignore me, right?” Fastida asked, giving Amy a pointed look.

  Amy didn’t notice. She was too busy rubbing a spot of pai
nt off her palm. The women on the farm had established a surprisingly lucrative business of painting Gitanan tiles. Brenna frequently went into Little Gitano to buy the sand-colored squares for the Earth equivalent of pennies each, and then Brenna, Amy, Fastida, and Cet would etch or paint them with intricate designs. The Jekhan traders Esteben worked with called on the farm frequently to claim the stock. Owen didn’t know who they were selling them to who could afford their rapacious markups, and the ladies didn’t care enough to ask. They let the middlemen worry about resale.

  Grunting, Fastida looked back to Precious and then gestured toward the hall. “Well, come on, then. I’ll show you where you can sleep. I still can’t believe Ais abandoned me like that. I thought she’d gotten used to me talking in my sleep.”

  Ais.

  Owen jammed his hands into his pockets and ground his teeth against his reflex to change the subject. No one looked to him for clarification, and volunteering one would have raised questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. He didn’t even know what he was doing with that woman, beyond saving her from herself.

  How the hell did that get to be my job?

  He rubbed his beard and watched Fastida escort a staggering Precious toward the hallway. Court followed at their heels, chattering about the contents of the linen closet.

  Others in the kitchen moved on to other conversations, other tasks. Everyone except Luke, anyway. He sidled up to Owen, putting his shoulder against his friend’s and bumping Owen’s elbow.

  “So, you’re going to town?” Luke asked. “What’s the name of the place? I’d like to go there and get my bearings, you know.”

  Marco, formerly distracted by his efforts to stuff as many pastries down his gullet as possible, stood and brushed crumbs off his holey Red Sox T-shirt. “I’ll go, too. Where are we going?”

  “Little Gitano.” Owen worked his hand up from his beard to his eyes, and then rubbed them.

  This is going to turn into a fucking daylong excursion.

  If Luke’s record for shenanigans held up, he’d stall their errand by drifting toward every pretty girl in town. There were many unattached ones, but he’d always had a peculiar knack for honing in on the most responsive targets. Women liked him and trusted him, probably because he had the face of a fallen angel—according to Erin—and a way of manipulating conversations so that other people thought they were doing the steering. The latter thing made him very good at his job. No one gathered information as well as Luke.