Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The scent had reached Brannik before the cell door had finished opening, but he kept his head down, his hair over his face, and his breathing slow and even the way he’d breathed for two days now.
Every meal came the same way. The stink of the guard first, the sour reek of a body that rarely washed with cheap liquor oozing out through his pores.
Then the false warmth of the food. He’d learned to sort the smells apart the way another male might sort coins in the dark.
This time there was a third smell, and it stopped the breath in his chest. A faint clean smell beneath road-dust and something oily she’d used on her skin, but unmistakable. Warm. Female.
He did not lift his head. He kept every muscle exactly where it had been, kept his shoulders slack against the raw stone, and let his mind go still.
A female. A human female.
He’d worked cargo across more ports than he could name, and sat elbow to elbow with a hundred kinds of people in a hundred filthy dockside bars, and he’d only encountered that scent once before in twenty years of drifting. And the guard had no idea.
That was the part that snagged him. The Ordanian stood there in the doorway with his anvil jaw and his stupid grin, close enough to touch her, and he smelled nothing.
Called her boy. The disguise was good, he recognized that, the loose clothes swallowing whatever shape she had, the hood pulled low, and the muddied cast she had smeared over her face and hands.
Good enough to fool a bored guard who saw only what he expected to see.
It did not fool him.
She crossed the cell, her head down, and he watched the way she moved through the curtain of his hair.
It wasn’t the shuffle of a slow-witted errand runner.
Her movements were deliberate and controlled.
A body that knew exactly how much space it took up and had decided to take up less.
He knew that walk. He’d built his own version of it over years.
She set the tray down within easy reach of his hands, which was a courtesy the guards hadn’t bothered with, and he caught the small hitch in her breath when she saw the state of him up close.
The bruises. The raw meat of his wrists.
She didn’t like it. He filed that away, then made a decision he didn’t entirely understand, and lifted his head.
She froze.
He looked at her and let her look at him, and for a moment neither of them moved.
Her eyes went wide. Hazel eyes, in a face too fine-boned and soft for the male she pretended to be, despite the mottled grey covering her skin.
He watched the recognition move through her, and watched her understand that he was not the vicious animal she’d been told.
She was quick. She caught it in half a second, and in the next half-second she smoothed it away.
Not quick enough to fool him, but quick enough that the guard would never notice.
“I said back off.” The Ordanian’s boots scraped the floor. “You deaf as well as ugly? Move.”
Something turned over in his chest, hot and unfamiliar.
He’d sat still through worse. He’d sat still while they hit him and burned him, while they ran current through the collar until his vision whited out and his own body betrayed him, and he had given them nothing but growls and the occasional lunge, buying himself time and information with his silence.
He had discipline the way other males had bones. It held him up. It kept him alive.
And a fat drunk fool calling a hidden female ugly nearly cracked it.
The urge to snap the cargo cuffs, cross the cell in one stride, and break that anvil jaw came hard and fast. He’d known he could do it since the first hour.
The restraints were built for freight, not for a Tuori who’d spent his childhood being broken to Tuori standards, and the collar was the only real problem, and even the collar had a pattern to it he’d nearly finished mapping.
He didn’t move.
He let the growl build instead, low in his chest, and let it roll out slowly so the guard would think it was aimed at him, at the food, at the world.
The Ordanian flinched back a half-step and swore, and covered the flinch with more shouting, and the female was already at the door, already leaving, her clean scent thinning in the damp air.
That was for you, he thought, watching the empty doorway. Not for him.
The door groaned shut, and the lock cycled. The buzzing light overhead flickered and steadied.
He looked at the tray. Bread that smelled almost good. Stew, thick and brown, that smelled almost like food, and he’d learned within his first meal here that it was not. At least not for him.
The majority of the stew was pressed and flavored plant protein, the kind they fed to indentured labor and prisoners, the kind his Tuori body couldn’t process.
His Aurelian mother could have processed it, but his father’s blood ran too strong in him for that.
Half a bowl of the stuff would leave him doubled over and sick as a child.
The guards didn’t know that. If they’d deliberately been trying to make him ill, they’d have found something worse.
This was only carelessness. The same slop for every cage.
He picked out the two pieces of meat-based protein and left the rest of the stew where it sat.
He grabbed the bread round and stuffed it down, then leaned his head back against the stone.
The cold seeped through his hair into his skull, and he let it, observing his body as he observed everything.
Weaker than two days ago. The paralytic they’d hit him with was long out of his system, but hunger was a slower drug and it was doing its work.
His wrists ached in the cuffs. The cut on his forearm itched as it tried again to knit.
But below all of it, the strength was still there. He’d been careful to hide how much.
He’d ended up here because of a mistake, and he made himself think about it, because a male who lied to himself about his mistakes made them twice.
He’d been chasing the ghost of his mother for twenty years.
Twenty years of ports and rumors and dead ends, of leaning on dockworkers and paying informants and trying to find the thin cold trails that Aurelians left in the galaxy when they left any trail at all.
Silver eyes, someone would murmur in a bar three systems over.
A female who could touch the old machines and wake them.
He’d cross half the sector on less than that.
He’d built a whole life out of following whispers about the mother who’d walked away when he was eleven and never come back.
This time the whisper had had teeth. A network, quiet and well-funded, buying and moving things that had no business being bought or moved.
Precursor fragments, most of them. But also, more than once, rumors of people, people with specific traits—traits that might have been Aurelian—sold on to someone who paid well and asked no questions.
The trail had tightened and tightened until it pointed here, to Port Rusk, to a warehouse behind Krebb’s compound that showed up on no legitimate manifest.
So he’d gone in after the records. That was the mistake.
Not the going itself, but the arrogance of his attempt.
He’d walked onto cargo ships and infiltrated worse-guarded holds a dozen times, and he’d assumed this would be one more.
He’d found the office, found the sealed data records, and found three times the security a simple smuggling network should have.
They’d been ready. They seemed to have been waiting, and that alone told him he’d stumbled onto something bigger than pilfered relics.
They’d brought him down with a dart, in the end, not a fist. Something engineered and fast-acting, a paralytic that locked his enormous body up in seconds and dropped him where he stood.
He’d woken chained to the floor of this cell with a collar around his neck and four bruised guards looking at him like he was a bomb that hadn’t finished going off.
He’d decided, in that first hour, to let them keep thinking it.
Let them think he was broken. That he was some stupid slab of Tuori muscle that had wandered where it shouldn’t and could be squeezed for a ransom or sold for a price.
Or, best of all, that he was dangerously unstable, an animal that might come apart at any moment.
He fed each theory in turn. A growl here.
A sudden strain against the cuffs that made them jump back and reach for their shock-prods.
A long blank stare that gave them nothing at all.
Males who thought him a beast asked beastly questions, and beastly questions told him what they were afraid of.
The interrogations had been sloppy, run by frightened underlings who let too much slip between the pain.
He’d learned that they answered to Krebb, and Krebb answered to someone more important.
He’d learned there was a patron, spoken of in the hushed voice males used for money or worse.
Someone who paid well for the precursor fragments passing through Krebb’s hands.
But the artifacts weren’t the only things Krebb’s people had been searching for.
There had been references to individuals as well.
Questions about bloodlines and unusual abilities.
The kind of thing an Aurelian carried in every cell.
The kind of thing his mother had and might have passed to him, sleeping under his skin.
They don’t know why I’m here.
He was almost certain of it. If they’d connected him to the records he’d tried to steal, the interrogations would have been considerably more focused.
Instead they saw a Tuori brawler who’d wandered where he shouldn’t.
Muscle and horns and a temper. A good candidate for the fight pits, perhaps, if they couldn’t find someone else to pay for him.
They had no idea what he’d actually been looking for. He intended to keep it that way.
He considered his options carefully, the way he considered everything.
He could attempt to break out tonight. He could flee over the wall and be gone before the compound woke, and take the memory of the data records he hadn’t managed to read out into the dark with him, and keep chasing the whispers.
Or he could stay. He could gamble that the patron’s interest would eventually pull the patron closer.
He could let them bring him up out of this hole to whatever waited above, closer to the records and the network and whatever answer might sit at the center of it.
An answer with his mother’s name written somewhere inside.
Staying was madness. Staying meant more current through the collar, more careful days of hunger and playing dead. He’d endured far worse for far less on the search for his mother.
The light buzzed again. Water trickled from the ceiling into the unseen drain, slow and patient, and he matched his breathing to it. For one last time before he had to set it aside, he let himself think about the clean warm scent that had come and gone through the cell door.
A female. Hidden in plain sight, in the middle of a place that bought and sold people like her for parts.
Whatever she was doing in Port Rusk, she was doing it scared.
He’d smelled that too, under the road-dust and the oily camouflage, the sharp note of fear when he’d lifted his head and let her see him thinking.
He’d frightened her. He hadn’t meant to, and the fact that he cared at all was its own small, unwelcome surprise.
He sighed and closed his eyes, filing her away with everything else he was waiting on, and settled in to be underestimated a while longer.