3 The Idiot in Heels
The Idiot in Heels
T emmi slammed her brakes. Some idiot was smoking in front of the dumpsters outside the city offices. Make that two idiots. And one of them in heels, no less.
She blared her horn. Her shift had ended over an hour before, and she still had half of Jordie’s route to go. She wanted to get home before the sky turned dark, show Ollie the fresh credits in her account, ease his mind. Pay Shrimps before law enforcement broke down their front door.
The idiot in heels was not only sitting against the dumpster Temmi needed to empty but had the gall to wave a hand as though commanding Temmi to leave. The absolute nerve.
Temmi plucked out her earplugs, rolled down her truck’s window, and leaned half-out. “Get out of the way!”
The loiterers stared at her dumbly. Based on their warm-toned skin and dark hair, they weren’t native X-ers.
Likely university kids from some Outer Expanese planet who’d gotten shafted with the worst government internship in the history of time, too privileged to imagine that someone might speak a language other than their own.
Temmi switched from X-er to what she knew was passable Imperial Expanese.
She spoke the empire’s common tongue better than most X-ers on account of her deadbeat father drilling the language into her from birth—up until he’d abandoned her, that was. “I said, get out of the way!”
This time, the pair appeared to understand. The one in heels called back, “We’re good, thanks. Come back later.”
Like hell Temmi was going to come back later . She breathed out slowly, killed her truck’s engine, and opened the driver’s-side door.
She hopped to the ground, not bothering to shut the door, and stomped toward the idiots, her coat forgotten in her truck. It didn’t matter—the cold didn’t bother her, not with her blood pounding in her veins.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Temmi allowed her voice to release all the emotion that’d been boiling in her since that morning. It felt good. “I said, get out of my fucking way. ”
The idiot in heels exchanged a look with the other one, a pretty man wearing a shocked expression. A filtration mask dangled from his fingertips, the kind that could’ve financed an entire year of Temmi’s mother’s treatments while keeping a roof over her family’s heads. Her temper flared.
The woman rose to her feet in a single fluid motion, her raven hair spilling halfway down her back.
She was wearing a dress, of all the impractical things.
A grin that could only be described as malevolent spread slowly across her face.
“Nicky,” she purred in a sultry voice, “who the hell do I think I am?”
The man stepped forward and grabbed the woman by her upper arm. He said, in Temmi’s direction, “You’ve clearly got a job to do here, so we’ll be going.”
The woman tugged her arm out of his grasp. She sauntered closer to Temmi, swaying with a sensual grace, entirely unencumbered by her five-inch heels and the uneven pavement.
She tossed her hair. “You’re cute, in a grimy sort of way.” With a twirl of her wrist, she made a gesture that seemed to encompass Temmi’s entire body. “I admit, the jumpsuit has a certain appeal. What’s your name?”
Temmi balked. “Are you shitting me right now? What are you? Some kind of”—she sought the right word in Expanese—“ narcissist ?”
Back by the dumpsters, her male companion made a choked sound that might’ve been half laughter, half something else. The woman shot him a glare.
Two could play the intimidation game. Temmi closed the remaining distance between herself and the other woman.
She had to look up to meet her gaze. Sharp, pale violet eyes stared back, shining and amused.
There was something familiar about her, something that niggled at the back of Temmi’s mind, but she couldn’t place what, exactly.
She had flawless tanned skin, cutting cheekbones and a wicked mouth.
In a word, she was beautiful, which only made Temmi all the more eager to wipe the smug grin from her perfect face.
“You know what?” Temmi let disdain color her words. “Stay. I happen to have a friend at the district police’s office.” (By friend she meant former probation officer , but semantics). “There’s a dialer in my truck—one code from me and he’ll be here.”
But the woman wasn’t cowed. If anything, Temmi’s threat only seemed to amuse her more. She quirked an eyebrow, her gaze boring into Temmi’s with a stomach-clenching intensity. “Ooh, not a dialer ! I didn’t realize we’d gone back in time a thousand years.”
Temmi wasn’t done. “So, you’re a narcissist and a jackass. Good to know. Did you also know my friend gets a commission for every person he finds violating the shelter-in-place? Thanks to the empire’s precious little heirs’ visit today, the fine is astronomical.”
The woman’s smile widened maddeningly. “Those heirs really know how to ruin a good thing, don’t they?”
From the other side of the loading dock, the woman’s companion called out, “Spie, leave her be. We should be getting back. Kalvin will be worried— Hey! Turn that camera off; you don’t have authorization to be filming right now!”
Temmi flipped around. Two men were huddled behind the open door of her trash truck, one of them with a boxy, expensive-looking camera pointed directly at Temmi. The other sported a look of triumph. They both wore caps that read X72-1 The Buzz in bold gold lettering.
What the actual hell? And then it hit Temmi, with the delicacy of a satellite crashing to the earth. A horrid, gut-wrenching realization. She turned back around, slower this time, like a criminal preparing to face the noose.
The man by the dumpster had named the woman in heels Spie . And before that, the woman had called him Nicky . Which, now that Temmi was taking a moment to think , sounded an awful lot like a nickname for Nix.
Someone please incinerate me, she thought.
An LZ beam between the eyes—a quick death.
She hadn’t really called the princess of the Expan Empire , a woman who had the power to execute an entire planet on a whim, a woman in line to rule the entire progeny of humanity, a narcissist and a jackass? To her face? No, that would be suicide.
Except that Temmi had. And someone had captured the whole thing on camera.
Her horror must’ve shown on her face because the woman, Spielin fucking Expani , dropped her expression of amusement.
“Ah, I see reality has caught up to you. For what it’s worth, I had fun.
” Then, with a slight brush of her shoulder against Temmi’s, she marched by to address the cameramen.
Her brother was already there—Temmi hadn’t even noticed him go by.
Nix . Ollie would’ve been beside himself.
The prince cut a striking figure with his mess of black hair, broad shoulders, and long, slender athletic build.
Nearly as striking as his sister, though more understated.
How had Temmi not immediately realized who they were?
It was so obvious now. And it wasn’t as though she’d never seen pictures of them.
Images of the heirs were constantly blaring on her holoscreen, thanks to Ollie.
But to be honest, she’d never truly paid attention.
And some part of her brain had refused to even acknowledge that it was possible to run into the imperial heirs on a routine trash run.
While Temmi stood there, dumbfounded, more people rounded her truck and poured onto the loading dock.
Not the least of which were twenty muscled guards in black suits with the seal of the Expan Empire sewn into their sleeves.
They wore full-face helmets with silver visors and had what looked like actual LZ blasters slung across their chests.
Every plausible exit was blocked off in seconds.
So, no slinking away quietly and disappearing to a new city. Or planet. Or galaxy.
Shit.
A man in a filtration mask approached Temmi, flanked by two more of the black-suits and a woman wearing a garish yellow hat.
“Hello, I’m Kalvin Kar-Beidell,” said the man.
He had dark obsidian skin, was entirely bald, and through the mask, his Expanese was accented.
He spoke in slow, measured sentences. “I’m one of Love Galaxy ’s executive producers—I work directly with the heirs.
Your encounter here has been broadcast to the whole of your planet.
Containing it at this point is impossible—I expect the clip to reach Expan in minutes.
These things take on lives of their own, you understand? ”
Temmi did not understand. Would the emperor have her arrested? Hanged? Surely, people had been executed for less. She’d all but told the emperor’s children to go fuck themselves while her entire planet watched.
“I didn’t realize— I never—” Temmi stared helplessly at her overrun truck. The heirs were no longer there.
The woman in the yellow hat grabbed Temmi’s right hand.
“My dear”—she turned Temmi’s hand palm up to scan her barcode with a screening device—“you’ve caused what I like to call an incident .
The legality of which is murky and the optics of which I don’t love.
And neither will Her Excellency. We need to get out in front of this, control the narrative, et cetera. ”
The screening device made a clicking sound, then projected a virtual profile into the air: a picture of Temmi from five years earlier, taken when she’d received her oversized motor vehicle license.
Her untamable hair, a darker blue than most X-ers—she had her father to thank for that—was held barely in check by the band at the nape of her neck. Below the picture, the words:
Name : ARTEMIS IALAN
Age : 22 Imperial Standard Years.
Nationality : X72 national with illegitimate half-Expanese parentage through father, Orion Gonxo . Mother is one Innis Ialan , full X72 native.