Chapter 6
Hallie
By early evening I’m still thinking about Maxon’s personal crystal.
Really, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life. And he said it was lit up like that, for me?
Amazing.
I’m in my room. The cleaning bot, Max, has been through already leaving it spotless and my bed made. There’s even a nice stack of fresh pajamas and an outfit for me to wear tomorrow, including shoes, socks and underwear.
This brings a smile of gratitude to my lips.
I turn the day over in my head like a stone I can’t put down.
My whole body vibrates with energy. This has been a surprisingly good day, made better by the addition of Maxon in my life.
That sexy miner was a joy to hand out with today.
The games. The way he laughed while we spent basically the whole day playing Karrec together.
Now that I’ve stopped running and reached my location, I am having the best time of my life, and I need to stop.
I need to stop right now. Because the cooking smells are drifting down the hall and there are children shrieking somewhere.
The whole compound is gearing up for dinner together and of course I’m invited to share this with them, because they’ve easily taken me in like one of their own.
Every minute I let myself sink into this comfort, I’m forgetting the fact that I’ve brought killers to their door.
There’s a knock.
I open the bedroom door to find Scar, Ines and Maxon standing in the hallway.
“Oh, hi.”
“Good afternoon,” Ines smiles in response.
“We read your write-up.” She holds up her tablet.
She has the brisk, bright energy of a person who’s found something she’s been hunting for a long time.
“Thank you for this, Hallie. I’m thankful to have this written down and so organized.
It’s very helpful. You have no idea how rare that is, most witnesses give you a mess and you spend a rotation untangling it. You’ve handed us a map.”
“I’m a Keeper,” I say. “Organizing things I’m not supposed to understand is the entire job.”
“Which is why I have about forty more questions,” Scar says.
“Can we come inside and talk to you about this?” Maxon questions.
“Oh, of course.” I step back and let them in.
Ines and I both sit on a rug on the floor and the two males sit side by side on the edge of the bed. And for the better part of an hour the three of them take my memory apart piece by piece.
Scar wants the names of the researchers.
He keeps circling back to them, the names I pulled, the ones paid through accounts scrubbed of the House’s fingerprints.
“These shipments,” he says, scrolling. “The untraceable ones. You said the coordinates weren’t on any registry you had access to, but you remember the coordinates. ”
“I remember everything I read. I have an excellent memory, which is why I’m good at my job, but that’s the curse of it. I can’t un-see a thing once it’s in front of me.”
“Say them.”
I repeat a string of numbers I read once, eighteen months ago, in a file I wasn’t supposed to open. Scar’s claws go still on the tablet. He looks at Ines. Something passes between them.
“That’s dead field, past the shipping lanes. There’s nothing out there but—”
“Dead rock,” Scar finishes. “Old played-out claims. Nothing anyone would ship to.” He looks at me, and there’s a new weight in it.
“Unless you wanted to do something to Illibrium where no one would ever think to look. The experiments aren’t theoretical.
They’re happening, somewhere out past the edge of the maps, in a place chosen precisely because no honest being would ever fly there. ”
“And the name,” Ines says. She’s working a different thread, the journalist’s thread, the one that goes through the public record instead of the private one.
“House Vaszneth keeps itself clean. Officially they’re a respectable, with stakes in a dozen legitimate operations.
Nothing connects them to any of this on paper.
But you—” she taps her tablet — “you put a name in your write-up. A male who signed for the House on three different documents you handled.”
“He thought I couldn’t read the seals,” I say.
“They all thought that. The little human who keeps the ledgers, what would she know about which Royal Pigment crest means what.” My mouth twists.
“I knew all of them. I memorized every crest in the Four Sectors my first month, because nobody bothered to teach me and I wasn’t going to be caught not knowing. ”
“Kryzon?” Scar questions.
“I told you. I don’t know anyone named Kryzon.”
“No. But the factor you named — the one who signed for House Vaszneth — I know who he reports to. And it’s the same residence in the Royal Pigment district that Kryzon visited, the one I could never put a name to.
For rotations I’ve had half a picture. The half that starts here, on Timbur, with my family.
Our parents death and then our brother banished.
A demotion dressed up as discipline. I knew it connected to Chronos and I could never prove the bridge.
” He looks at me like I’m something he can’t quite believe washed up on his porch in the rain.
“I assumed the bridge was Grytel, but now I see that it isn’t.
You’re the bridge. You’ve been carrying the other half of my picture around in your head this whole time, and you didn’t even know it was mine. ”
“I just didn’t want them to destroy a whole colony of miners just so they could make sure that Illibrium was controlled solely by one single Royal Pigment House. It’s wrong and literally against the Scales of Xylan Law. This whole plan disgusts me.”
“Thank you,” Ines says. “Thank you for being brave and coming here. I know you had to plan far ahead to get out of there with your evidence. You gave up your job and put yourself at risk. You had to hide for three whole days before making it here. The way you left was super sneaky. Impressive. So again, just in case you don’t know, we all think you’re pretty amazing.
Everything you’ve brought to us can mean the difference between life and death for all the Minecorp employees on this planet.
And we’re doing our best to get the information you gathered in the right hands. ”
“Or remain out of the wrong hands,” Scar cuts in.
“Yes, we’re being careful,” Ines agrees. “And that’s why we’re insisting that for now, you hide out here, in the compound with Maxon, to ensure your safety.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, my eyes hot. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“There’s one more thing,” Scar says. “You should know before you hear it some other way.” He glances at Maxon, and then back at me. “Someone’s been asking questions at the transporter station. Quietly. About a recent arrival, a human, traveling alone on a Minecorp work visa.”
The cold spreads all the way out to my fingers.
“When?”
“We don’t have it exactly, but one of the station techs owes Grytel a favor and flagged it.
” Scar’s eyes don’t leave my face. “It’s nothing yet.
A being asking careful questions is not the same as a being who knows where you are.
But it means you stay here, out of sight, exactly where you are.
You don’t go near that mine and you don’t exist as far as Timbur is concerned. ” A pause. “Do you understand me?”
“We understand,” Maxon rumbles.
Three hours later, after dinner is over, Maxon walks me back to my room.
It’s a short walk and we both know the way.
Neither of us needs an escort, but he falls into step beside me and I’m thrilled to have him.
Every moment I spend with this miner causes heat to form between my thighs.
My mind is full of images of the two of us in bed together and me, kissing those lips with abandon.
I have trouble keeping my eyes off his perfect ass and those thick, muscular arms.
Maxon sat next to me at dinner again. I’m beginning to understand that he meant it when he said that he thinks I’m his future bride.
He fully believes that if we performed a hand clasping ceremony it would prove valid and that would lead to a claiming ceremony.
Which, according to the Scales of Xylan Law, would make me, a human, his bride.
And every minute I spend with him causes me to think this sounds like a terrific idea. It’s too bad this is all happening at the exact same moment I’ve got House Vaszneth to deal with.
“You did a hard thing in there,” he says when we reach the end of the hallway, nodding toward my bedroom door.
“Eh, I read some numbers off the inside of my own skull. It’s not exactly heroic.”
“Don’t minimize what you’ve done,” he growls. “You’ve put yourself at great risk to come here and try to save all of us. You are a brave human, Hallie. Own it. Realize it.”
I blink. Why do they keep talking like this to me? The beings in this compound are going to cause me to have a big head. “Oh, okay.”
He gives a curt nod and then pauses in front of his bedroom door. “Can I tell you something, about the game?”
I place my hands on my hips. “Is it that you cheat?”
“I do not cheat,” he grumbles, clearly affronted.
“No, I was going to tell you, as I’m sure you could tell from how my brothers greeted us when they returned this evening.
I’m the only one in this whole house who plays Karrec.
I never could get a single one of my brothers interested, not Chief, not Scar, not any of them.
They think it’s a waste of a perfectly good evening.
” He rubs the back of his neck. “So when I was young, after school let out, I found the gaming hall down in the colony. And I’d go there every day.
Hang around the tables where the old males played, until they got tired of shooing me off and started teaching me instead.
They taught me everything. For rotations.
And now I’m the club champion. Which means I’m the best Karrec player on Timbur. ”