Chapter 6
SOLEIL
She blew out a breath, releasing tension from a day spent scrubbing, cleaning, and later, baking.
Her back ached, her feet throbbed, and her neck was stiff from bending over showers and sinks that had n’er seen love for a while.
The worst part of having a gig on The Sombra wasn’t the work.
It was her living situation.
She stepped into the cramped shared one-bedroom apartment and into pure chaos.
Delivery parcels sat on the floor, while dirty dishes in the kitchen sink balanced precariously in a growing pile.
Clothes teetered in the wash basin, half-folded laundry formed nests on the threadbare couch, and a trail of food wrappers led from the tiny kitchenette to the sleeping nook.
Soleil’s shoulders tightened. ‘Dammit, Lilla.’
Her roommate, if one might call her that, was more like a domestic tornado.
Lilla was a twitchy, neurotic woman who paid for her passage to Pegasi by offering her hacking skills to paying punters.
Soleil was sure the woman worked for shady scam artists across the flotilla.
Which only served to ratchet up her paranoia.
With her hair tied in a wild explosion of locs and knots, Lilla spoke in murmurs, paced in loops, and had a conspiracy theory about everything.
From the water filters being poisoned to the sun lamps rigged to control their moods.
She spent most of her time in her room, on conspiracy chat rooms with other misguided, brainwashed souls.
Soleil didn’t even have a bedroom.
She slept on a foam pallet tucked behind the collapsed couch frame, with a dented locker for her possessions and an emergency curtain she pulled over her for privacy.
With a sigh, Soleil dropped the ration bag on the kitchenette counter and began cleaning.
She washed up, and once the surfaces were clear of grot and dishes, she unloaded her grocery sack.
Butter. A small block, scarcely discernible. Flour, a week’s ration’s worth. Two eggs, pure gold.
She unwrapped them with care.
With these, she had enough to make a new batch of her favorite baked treats.
As she laid the ingredients out, a question clanged around in her mind like a pan left loose in zero-G.
Why was she baking for Santi?
No doubt, she enjoyed it as a respite from work.
She crafted her goodies in between her shifts and her study of the pile of maps and old ship blueprints scattered across the diminutive table beside her sleeping pallet.
Leaving him a few of her leftover tarts and slices was not a hardship.
Still, what was she doing?
He wasn’t for her.
He was leagues above her station.
Santiago Alvarro was the XO of a war machine corporation, one that enforced peace and order with ruthless efficiency on the flotilla.
The epitome of what she fought against these last couple of years.
Yet she thought about him when she cleaned, when she stirred batter or kneaded dough.
She lingered on that lazy smirk of his, the one that curled at the edges of his mouth, the one that made her breath hitch.
She imagined his hands sliding down her spine, holding her from behind as he whispered into her ear and called her carino.
She told herself it was harmless, that she was only showing appreciation, a gesture.
However, some deep, unspoken part of her knew better.
She wanted to care for him, to freakin’ nurture him, and be cared for by him.
It was as if the sun inside her recognized the storm in him and craved to wrap him in her heat.
She scowled, cracking eggs into a bowl.
‘I’m freakin’ hopeless,’ she muttered to herself.
Lilla shuffled into the common area from the sleeping nook, mumbling.
Her rainbow-hued hair stood up in wild tufts, and she had one sock on.
‘They’re listening,’ she whispered, rubbing her arm. ‘The vents, they whisper. I hear them when I sleep.’
Soleil ignored her, having grown accustomed to her diatribes by now.
Lilla wandered back into her room, muttering.
Soleil took an inhale.
This bedsit was her last choice given her meager income.
It was also nondescript and out of the way, which suited her need for privacy just fine.
If enduring Lilla was the price she had to pay, then so be it.
She began to mix milk, sugar, and eggs, loving the swirl of pale yellow that became silky and thick.
With no warning, a burning sensation hit her right wrist.
She gasped, dropped her mixing spoon, and clutched her forearm.
Her fingers fumbled to soothe it, but the dermis under her hand throbbed, and she winced even as her pulse raced.
A dull, internal thrum pulsed outward, and her skin reddened in a cuff like a vice around her wrist.
She fell back against the counter behind her, eyes dilating, unbelieving.
‘The fokk?’
Regardless, and beyond her control, from her heated dermis rose a cloud of metallic nanites that formed into a sleek, metallic band that folded over her wrist like a thick bracelet.
Its violation shocked her, and she gasped.
‘What in the Wildlight hell?’ she breathed, panic streaming through her.
The circlet flashed, lighting up in thin fractal lines of crimson and gold.
Above her hand, a hologram shimmered to life.
It coalesced into a face shrouded in static, human, yet glitching through a fluctuating link.
Feral. With eyes that glowed like forge coals and an utterance like gravel dragged through wire.
‘Scarletta?’ a hoarse and guttural voice rasped. ‘I see you.’
Soleil glared at him with bile in her throat.
‘You did this? Fokkin’ why?’
‘Why do you think? Just keeping tabs on you,’ her handler sneered with oily amusement. ‘You didn’t think we’d just let our precious Scarletta wander the galaxy unsupervised, did you?’
Her mouth pursed. ‘Fokk. When did you do this?’
‘We drugged you,’ the figure said with a grin that exposed sharpened incisors, ‘and inserted it before we released you into the wild, not unlike tagging a feral beast.’
Soleil’s pulse kicked up, and her stomach twisted.
‘We’re using it to trace you. To summon you when we need you. I hope you don’t need me to remind you of your purpose.’
Vern sneered as his visage faded out to a new holo stream that projected a sickening image of a slightly older woman curled on the floor of a cell, flinching as an unseen boot kicked her side, while her voice echoed, pleading for Soleil to get her.
Vern’s face swam back into view.
‘Enough incentive for you, or have you forgotten what you’re fighting for?’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Soleil spat, her heart hammering with rage at the sight of a soul trussed up and violated.
‘Good,’ it purred, the fangs flashing again. ‘Then tell me, how goes our little plan?’
Her gaze flicked to the floor, to the scattered maps and blueprints, some hand-sketched, others pulled from stolen archives.
‘It’s going,’ she gritted.
His eyes narrowed. ‘It’s taking too long. You’re our secret weapon. If you don’t start hustling and sending us data we can actually use, my people might have to help you along.’
Dread scalded her spine.
Soleil swallowed. ‘I’m working as fast as I can. I already sent you the diagrams and codes you wanted. It’s all I found in the maintenance office.’
‘They’re old. We require more up-to-date schematics so we can work smarter,’ it snapped. ‘If your approach isn’t effective, find another way. Charm, poison, a blade, whatever you need. If you want to keep her alive, you’ll do as I say.’
‘I don’t operate -.’
‘Think like your father,’ the man snarled. ‘Not some floozie bimbo!’
Just then, a screech pierced the air.
Soleil whirled around as Lilla burst into the room, hair wild, eyes frenzied.
She took one look at the flickering glow of the holo and screeched like a banshee.
‘I TOLD YOU!’ she wailed. ‘They’re in the vents! You’ve let them in!’
The face in the projection leaned forward, glitching as it laughed, ‘Boo!’
Lilla jumped and screamed as the holo winked out and the nanites of the cuff device melted back into Soleil’s wrist, under the skin.
‘You, you’re one of them,’ Lilla shrieked, backing away, then grabbing a broom from the kitchenette and swinging.
‘Lilla, wait!’
It was no use.
Lilla lunged, screaming incoherently, the broom whooshing past Soleil’s head.
Soleil ducked, stumbling over the couch, arms raised.
‘It’s not what you think,’ she tried to explain.
‘You’re talking to the ghosts! To the demons!’ Lilla yelled. ‘They live in the plumbing! You’re infected!’
She swung again. Soleil grabbed her wrist, trying not to hurt her, attempting to restrain the crazed woman without fighting back.
Lilla slammed her elbow into Soleil’s ribs.
‘OUT!’ Lilla bellowed. ‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!’
Soleil reeled back, her breath knocked out.
She recognized the madness in her roommate’s eyes. There would be no reasoning, no mercy.
She packed her gear, her thermal blanket, and stuffed clothes, shoes, uniform, and paperwork into a bag.
All the while striving to fob off an incensed Lilla.
With superhuman strength, she shoved the kicking, screaming woman off her and grabbed her duffel, heart hammering, and staggered toward the door.
‘LEAVE, SCARLET DEMON!’ Lilla screamed, pelting her with two rationed eggs from their tiny stockpile.
One splattered against Soleil’s shoulder.
The other burst through the wall behind her.
Soleil flinched and bolted, boots thudding down the corridor.
The door slid shut with a hiss of foreboding exile.
A few residents peered from their units. No one said anything. Some shook their heads in pity. Others just stared.
She wiped yolk from her shirt, trembling.
With an inhale, she adjusted her duffel on her back, squared her shoulders, and walked, with nowhere to go, no place to call her own.
Her teeth ground together as she stormed down the passageway, jaw clenched so tight it ached.
She needed to lie down and rest; she had a full day of work ahead of her tomorrow and a mountain of sorrow on her heart.
Soleil wandered the lower decks of The Sombra for an hour or two, searching for new accommodation.
None of the rental agents on each level had room to spare.
With time moving fast, she decided to find a place to sleep rough for the night and try again the following day.
She kept walking until her legs burned and the bag on her back dug into her spine, yet still her eyes swept every nook and cranny, searching for reprieve, someplace to lie down.
She located a narrow corridor, more like an old cargo artery long since abandoned by official routes.
Half its lights flickered, the others long dead.
The walls were slick with coolant mist and age, and a dull red glow came from a cracked bulb hanging above like a broken promise.
Tucked beneath an overhead shaft that belched rhythmic huffs of warm, recycled air, she’d found the alley of the forgotten.
Bodies sprawled in silence under synthetic cardboard shelters, fraying, patched, and stitched together with polymer bands and grit.
Makeshift homes sat in haphazard angles around crates, bent metal rods, and strips of heat-dampening fabric.
Inside them sat what she could only describe as wraiths, hollowed by hunger and weariness, bundled in second-skin thermal wraps or crouched beside scavenged heaters that no longer glowed.
Soleil’s gaze swept over them. None met her gaze; most heads bowed in shame, or slumped on a koko high.
Her eyes fell on a man with missing fingers, who cradled his hands within his shirt.
Then, a woman in a knitted beanie rocked back and forth, eyes glassy.
A cluster of children lay wrapped in what looked like tarpaulin stitched from emergency space blankets.
With a sigh, Soleil approached the space under an open shaft venting heated condensation, hesitating.
None of the rough sleepers were near it.
Every single pallet, each scrap of mat or blanket, was angled away from its output.
Soleil was too tired to mull the reasons why.
Still, it was warm, which would augment her threadbare jacket and blanket.
Soleil stepped below the vent.
The toasty condensation settled over her, blanketing her skin like a humid mist. The air carried a metallic scent, but she didn’t care.
She sank to the ground, dragging her duffel beneath her head like a pillow and curling onto her side.
She pulled the thin thermal blanket over her.
The concrete floor was unforgiving, but the shaft’s warmth gave the illusion of safety. The hum of turbines droned far beneath her, as did the thrumming of the power conduits just under the surface.
They were living ghosts, she thought, just like her.
She unzipped the top flap of her bag and pulled out her commtab. It powered on with a flicker, bathing her face in blue light.
Her thumb hovered over Astra’s contact.
Her friend would let her stay and offer her a couch, a blanket, and warmth. Maybe even food.
However, her finger didn’t move.
The idea of begging, explaining, and being judged at this late hour niggled at her.
Nada.
The indignity sat like acid in her throat.
Astra didn’t need to know about her failed life, nor the fight that ended with a cracked egg dripping down her spine, or the monster lingering in her mind.
In the few months on this ship, Soleil had managed to keep her private life separate from her workmates, part of her terrified of tainting what little goodness she had left.
So instead, Soleil tilted the commtab away and stared up at the duct vent.
Steam rolled down in waves of warm, damp air.
She closed her eyes, but Santi’s face surfaced like a lure.
His lopsided smile.
His molten-timbred voice slipped under her skin with a softness that cut deeper than steel.
His gaze at her made it seem like he was all over her secrets.
She took an inhale. The man had no place in her mind, and she had no right to think about him.
So she shoved his image from her thoughts and curled tighter, her arm encircling her duffel, her cheek pressed into it.
A droplet of condensation landed on her eyelid and slid down her temple like a tear she refused to shed.