Chapter 29
Twenty Nine
Jin
Anandra. Greer. Raya.
Those were the children’s names.
It took some doing but Jin managed to coax their story out of them. He was sure his youthful appearance had something to do with that. The children were a lot more distrustful of Maggie.
Despite their parents being wanderers, it was obvious these children had grown up surrounded by love. When they were young, the forty-three would never have dropped their guard with another like that. Child or not.
As Kira suspected, Anandra, Greer, and Raya were taken during the attack on their enclave. They were kept on Titan for a while until Anandra saw an opportunity to escape while their captor’s guard was lowered.
After that, Greer and Raya were moved to the honeycomb. Anandra joined them when he was re-captured a few days ago.
From what the boy had to share, Caius had played a big part in his first escape. He also seemed to think the marshal was somewhere else in the honeycomb.
“Do you know where?” Jin asked.
Anandra shook his head. Greer and Raya followed suit a second later.
“Give it a rest, kid. What could you do even if they told you?” Maggie asked with a scoff.
“I don’t remember you being this pessimistic, Maggie.”
“Stop acting like you know me, kid. You don’t.”
Jin forgot to control his expression for a moment, giving Maggie a glimpse of his crazy. A little of it anyway. Rather than try to smooth things over, Jin decided to roll with it. “Maggie, I suggest you refrain from getting on my bad side.”
Kira wasn’t around to hold him back if he decided to snap.
“I’m a victim too, you know.”
“You’re the person who handed a honeycomb over to a criminal enterprise. There are victims here, but you’re not among them.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Maggie complained.
“I don’t want to hear it. You could have sold it to the government.”
Even with their pay scale, the sisters would have made plenty.
“The government no longer pays for shit like this.”
“Bullshit.”
Jin was in the business. He knew exactly how much something like this was worth.
“I’m not lying. Things have changed in the last six months.
Used to be, you could make a steady living with scraps from these wrecks.
Not anymore. Why do you think so many salvagers are no longer in business?
Because they can’t make enough to keep their ships afloat.
It’s either the black market or nothing. ”
“That can’t be right,” Jin murmured.
He’d checked the going rate on salvages when he was researching why so many of their old contacts had dried up. Everything was the way it had always been. If anything, the rates had gone up on certain things.
“Don’t know what to tell you,” Maggie said. “It’s the way it is.”
They quieted as voices approached from a distance.
Jin gestured the children back under the blanket, moving to stand in front of it as several people approached the cell.
Maggie made herself as small as possible in the corner.
Jin felt a tug on the back of his pants. He looked down to find Greer poking her head out from under the blanket.
“You should hide too,” she whispered.
Jin crouched, tucking her back under the fabric. “I’m afraid not, little one. Someone must stay out here to face the dragons.”
“They will take you.”
Jin smiled and pinched her cheek. “That’s the plan, sweetheart. Don’t worry. Someone is coming for you. Her hair will be red and she has a fondness for setting things on fire. When she arrives, be sure to tell her she’s late.”
“I will,” Greer whispered, scooting backward.
Jin straightened and faced the front of the cell just as Gator and several others approached.
“Where’s Brooks?” Gator asked, looking around.
Jin widened his eyes. “Who?”
That must be Flame’s real name.
“Never mind,” Gator dismissed, turning to his companions. “You wished to see those we captured. This is them.”
One of the individuals with him stepped forward, sweeping an assessing glance over the still unconscious Arly. He then studied Jin before moving on to Maggie.
“There was no one else?” the man asked.
“There are a couple kids hiding somewhere in there, but yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
The man and woman shared a glance.
Jin wondered if Ryan knew that Mars and Cleo had decided to throw in with the Tuann rebels. Or if this was another in a long line of the forty-three’s Machiavellian-style schemes.
“It’s not them,” Mars said with a glance at his companion.
Cleo’s bright yellow eyes contained nothing behind them. They looked dead. Something had been grafted onto the side of her face, leaving her visage permanently scarred.
“That’s a problem,” Cleo said.
Mars was black with the shadow of a beard gracing his hard jaw. His hair had a touch of white to its tips. As if something had started to leach the color out of his edges but then got distracted midway through.
“Who are you talking about?” Gator asked.
“The Phoenix and the Hermit,” Cleo answered in an emotionless voice.
Gator swallowed hard, his expression uneasy. “You don’t mean Kira Forrest.”
“She does,” Mars said, gliding back to Cleo’s side.
“You didn’t tell us it was the Phoenix we were going after.”
Cleo and Mars treated the human like air, acting like he wasn’t in the room.
“A confrontation with the Phoenix at this juncture would not serve our cause,” Cleo declared. “We should leave. This operation is blown.”
Gator blocked her path. “You brought her down on us. You should be the one to deal with her.”
The patch on Cleo’s cheek pulsed.
Gator choked and fell to his knees.
Before their eyes, he grew into an old man, collapsing face first onto the ground. Within seconds, he was dead. He continued to age, his body shriveling until his skin was shrink-wrapped to his bones and only a mummy remained.
Cleo stepped over the body. “Let’s go, brother. We don’t want to be here when the Phoenix arrives.”
“What about Augustensis? She’s seen our faces. She could tell Ryan.”
“She won’t. She’s too afraid of her own shadow to involve herself in these matters. She’ll go to ground. We can take care of her at our leisure later.”
Mars glanced back at Jin. “And him?”
“He’s no one. A child.”
“What if he talks?”
“No one will listen. They never do with children.”
Cleo glided out of the chamber. Mars cast one last look back at Jin before following.
A whoosh left Jin.
Holy shit. That had been close. Thank every higher power out there for this new face of his. If they’d recognized him, things could have gone very poorly.
He wasn’t in a state to defend himself against someone of the forty-three’s caliber.
“Kira had a drone she always kept with her. She called it Jin,” Maggie muttered.
“Maggie,” Jin warned.
Maggie’s gaze lifted to his. “That’s what Brooks called you.”
Don’t do it, Jin sang in his mind.
Maggie bolted to the edge of the cell. “Hey! Hey! Someone! I want to make a deal. Kira Forrest has a partner. His name is—”
She strangled on the rest of what she’d been about to say.
Jin’s chaterling lifted its face from the back of her neck. Blood lined its lips and cheeks from where it had bit through her spinal column.
“Damn it, Maggie. You never learn,” Jin swore as Maggie slumped to the floor, dead.
Worse—she’d made him scare the kids.
Just then, the prison cell’s barrier came down, courtesy of one of his spawn.
When that spawn crawled down, Jin took it and set it on top of the cot. “Stay here. Protect them.”
The spawn nodded as the chaterling landed on his shoulder. A minute’s tinkering and Jin adjusted the beacon so that his spawn would lead Kira to the children’s location first.
“Remember what I told you about the woman,” Jin advised before walking out of the cell in search of pirates.
Kira – The Honeycomb
“I can’t believe I survived that,” Kira muttered, peering up at the shaft she’d fallen down.
It had fucking hurt. A lot.
Her wrist and hip twinged as she picked herself up off the ground. The ankle she’d twisted in the shipyard twinged, any healing courtesy of Amila had been undone. Pieces of the amber wall she’d crashed through shifted and slid off her.
Kira triggered her comms. “Raider? Graydon?”
Radio silence.
It appeared she was on her own.
Kira turned in a circle, taking stock of the situation. For a brief moment, she considered trying to climb back up to where the others were waiting before disregarding that notion. The walls of the shaft were covered in some type of secretion, making them slippery and damn near impassable.
Even if she could climb up the gentle incline—likely the sole reason Kira hadn’t been splattered everywhere upon landing—it would take a considerable amount of time and effort.
There was no guarantee the others would be waiting for her at the top either.
They were behind enemy lines. The mission and the welfare of the group took precedent over all else.
Her best bet was to continue and hope she was able to rendezvous with the rest eventually.
“Damn it,” Kira muttered, glancing up at the shaft. So much for the honeycomb’s inhabitants being in stasis. Where had that war drone come from anyway?
Kira was considering the possibility of survival should the honeycomb fully wake when a groan had her stilling.
She listened, determining the source before silently ghosting toward it.
The chamber she’d fallen into wasn’t big, about the size of the Wanderer’s cargo bay, but it connected to several chambers of similar size via narrow, claustrophobia inducing tunnels.
Like the shaft, the tunnels were covered in more of those secretions. Kira tried not to think too closely about what was getting on her clothes as she forced her way through.
Jin’s scorpion wiggled out from its hiding spot in her clothes. It perched on her shoulder to watch its surroundings with interest.
Kira frowned at it but left it alone.
A few seconds later she pushed into a twin of the chamber she’d left.
“You look like crap, Roddy,” Kira said.
Roderick’s smile was shaky. “Roake’s heir. I can’t say I’m surprised.”