Chapter 2
TWO
The conference room smelled like recycled air and institutional soap, which was an improvement over the slaver ship, where everything had smelled like rust and fear and the scent of too many bodies in too little space for too long.
November counted the people in the room.
Three rescued, including herself. A young Therassi female named Korynn sat to her left with both hands flat on the table as if she needed to confirm the surface was real.
Across from them: a thin, gray-skinned male whose species November hadn't identified yet — he'd given his name as Pael and nothing else.
They'd spent the last few weeks together in separate cells, but this was the first time any of them had actually seen each other's faces up close.
Someone had put a box of tissues on the table. The Free Worlds Alliance standard issue, apparently. The universe had tissues. November found this unreasonably comforting.
The young female next to her kept glancing at the door. Every time she did, her body trembled.
"Hey," November whispered.
Korynn's gaze snapped to her.
"The lock panel on this side is green. That means it opens from the inside." November pointed to it. "I checked when we came in. We're not locked in here."
Something in the girl's face rearranged itself. Not calm, but something closer to it than panic. She nodded once.
"Also," November said, pulling the tissue box across the table and setting it between them, "these are surprisingly decent. Three-ply situation. Whatever else is going on with the galactic economy, the tissue game is strong."
Pael made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was brief and startled, as though it had escaped against his will.
They sat. They waited. Nobody had told them why they'd been separated from the other rescued captives and brought here, and the silence of that not-knowing pressed against the walls.
The door opened.
Three figures entered. The first was a woman in Alliance uniform — middle-aged, dark blue skin marked with silver insignia tattoos, carrying a datapad with the grip of someone who considered it a weapon. Her face was neutral. A commander, maybe, November guessed. Something senior.
Behind her: the pale Kleotrian from the rescue team.
He moved into the room and settled into the corner near the door without a word.
November had noticed him on the slaver ship.
It was hard not to. His coloring was arresting: white skin, black stripes where every other Kleotrian she'd ever seen wore orange and black.
He met no one's eyes and seemed to prefer it that way.
And behind him — filling the doorframe in a way that made the doorframe look like a design flaw — was the one who'd opened her cell.
A Drakon. She'd heard of them. Had always used the word dragon herself, the Earth term, the wrong term — the rest of the galaxy was particular about the distinction.
Drakons had humanoid forms. Dragons didn't. She understood the difference now in a way that was considerably more immediate than academic.
November's hands stilled on the table.
He was enormous. That was the first thing she'd noticed about him, and it remained the first thing, because the human brain was wired to notice when something in the room could physically block out the sun.
The scars covering the left side of his face caught the overhead light and threw shadows across it.
She'd only glanced at him on the ship before. Everything had happened so fast during the rescue. But now, under proper lighting, with nowhere else to be, she could actually see him.
The bones of his face were severe, all hard angles and deep-set shadows.
His nose had been broken and healed by someone who hadn't cared enough to set it straight.
His mouth — and here her inventory stuttered for a fraction of a second — was something else entirely.
Full, unguarded in a way the rest of him wasn't, with a lower lip that contradicted every sharp line above it.
Deep golden-brown skin, warm even under the fluorescent wash that made everyone else look vaguely deceased. And his dark hair pulled back from his face, with a single thread of silver at his left temple that drew her eye and held it.
His eyes were so dark they swallowed the light instead of reflecting it. On the ship, those eyes had looked at her through the bars and she'd looked back and something in the geometry of the moment had felt — important. Not safe. Not unsafe. Just important.
He'd only said four words to her. Can you walk?
Good. Then he'd moved on to the next cell and she'd caught a glimpse of his back — the breadth of it, and the way something large and dark folded against it, pressed flat and tight to his body.
Wings. She'd understood that dimly, in the way you understand things when your brain is triaging what matters and what can wait.
Wings had gone into the wait category. They were not in the wait category anymore.
Now he stood just inside the conference room with his back to the wall beside the door, arms crossed over his chest, watching the room without looking at any one of them directly.
His posture said guard duty. His mouth said nothing.
The wings were still folded — she could see the dark ridge of them above his shoulders, the way they shifted fractionally when he breathed, like something alive that had its own opinions about being kept still.
Something low in her stomach turned over. A slow, involuntary pull, like a current shifting beneath still water. Heat crept up the back of her neck and spread to the tips of her ears in a way that felt profoundly unhelpful.
November looked down at the tissue box on the table in front of her and studied it with sudden, intense fascination.
It was beige. It had a floral print. The flowers were some kind of alien species probably, five-petaled and vaguely optimistic in the way institutional décor always tried to be. She read the brand name twice.
Not the time. Not remotely, not even adjacently the time. You are sitting in a military debriefing room in borrowed clothes with unwashed hair and six weeks of captivity sitting in your bones, and you are not going to be the person who — no. Stop. Read the tissue box again.
She read the tissue box again.
The Alliance officer sat down across from them and set her datapad on the table.
She looked at each of them in turn before she spoke.
"My name is Commander Sethan. I'm the senior intelligence liaison for the Free Worlds Alliance Sector Seven operations.
This is Davn," she gestured toward the pale Kleotrian, "and Lord Rhaezon Vaethari, who led the boarding team that recovered you. "
Lord Rhaezon.
November's eyes lifted to his, but his gaze remained on the table.
"You've been separated from the general intake group because the three of you were held in a section of the ship that was operationally distinct from the main cargo hold.
What you were exposed to during your captivity there has significant intelligence value.
I want to be clear about several things before we begin.
" Sethan folded her hands on the datapad.
"This is not an interrogation. You are not under suspicion.
You are not obligated to share anything.
And what I'm about to tell you does not leave this room.
"The ship you were held on was operated by a trafficking network called the Crimson Ledger," Sethan continued.
"They're the largest and most sophisticated slaving operation in this quadrant of the galaxy.
The Alliance has been working to dismantle them for over a decade.
Progress has been..." she chose the word with care, "incremental. "
"They're winning," Pael said.
Sethan didn't blink. "We've been unable to identify their political protection in this quadrant. Until now." She tapped the datapad. "Each of you, based on where you were held and what occurred in that section during your captivity, may have witnessed something that can change that."
November's mouth went dry.
She knew what she'd seen. She'd been running over it in the back of her mind for weeks. She'd watched everything from the midsection of the slaver ship and kept it close, because watching was all she had when she had nothing else.
She hadn't been special when they took her. That was the part that stuck.
November had been three days into a standard transit hop from Meridian Station to the Nexian agricultural colony, where a rancher had purchased four yearling mares and wanted someone who understood equine acclimatization to oversee the introduction.
Routine work. A job she'd done a dozen times in the last five years: pack a bag, board a mid-range transport, sleep through the boring parts, wake up somewhere new with horses waiting.
The transport carried forty-six passengers. Eleven of them were human.
The Crimson Ledger hit them between jump points, in the dead corridor where comms didn't reach and nobody was scheduled to look.
The boarding took nine minutes. November knew because she'd been watching the transit clock above the main cabin door when the first impact threw her out of her seat, and she was watching it again when the armed figures in dark tactical gear finished sorting the passengers into two groups: those with resale value and those without.
All eleven humans went into the first group. Earth-origin stock was apparently a growth market. She learned this from the slaver who catalogued them — he'd said it conversationally, the way someone might discuss commodity futures, while scanning their faces against a pricing index on his datapad.