No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (40 page)

Aten’s next question surprised her. “What mission has the Emperor given my brother?”

Raena allowed herself a little smile. “Are you testing me?”

“Yes.”

“Your brothers are commanded to create a plague genetically keyed to the Templar. Jonan is meant to use the
Arbiter
to sue for peace as a cover for spreading this plague.”

“And you’re here to stop the plague?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think we can deny the will of the Empire?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you doing this to us?”

When she didn’t answer, he pounced at her, gloved hand raised to strike. Raena watched his eyes, not his hand. As the blow fell, she flung herself to the opposite side, grabbed his left arm and pulled him off balance, danced away. This was the fight she had trained for all her life: when a Thallian was still young and fit enough to test her, but she was old and wily and strong enough to match him.

Aten attacked, trying to shove her against the wall of the vehicle depot. She blocked him and stood her ground. He was startled when her fist slipped past his guard and landed hard enough on his jaw that he bit his tongue with his sharpened teeth. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Raena darted around him enough that he never knew which direction her next attack would come from. He grimaced, surprised to find her his equal. Blood streaked his teeth.

She hit him again in the jaw and barely got away when he grabbed for her. She raised her fist to lick his blood from her knuckles.

He watched her, seemingly captivated. Then, without warning, he swept her feet out from beneath her. She landed on the stone floor.

He kicked her hard as he could in the thigh. Raena rolled with the blow, managed to get to her hands and knees before he kicked her again. And again. And again.

She forced her eyes open, locking the pain away somewhere else. She had to think.

Next time he kicked her, she sat up fast. Grabbed his calf and held on. Forced his foot up higher. Kicked his standing shin hard with her sharpened heel.

When he lost his balance, she pounced on him.

As she tightened her hands around his throat, Raena smiled into Aten’s eyes. She knew where to put her fingers to cut off his oxygen, to slow the blood to his brain, to give him the most pain without allowing him to lose consciousness.

She thought he would struggle more. She thought he would argue or try to tempt her. Instead, as it had when she killed his twin in the future, masochism got the better of him. Aten surrendered to the sensation of death tightening around his throat.

Clarity chilled her. She wanted to kill Aten as much as she’d ever wanted anything in her life. But why? As a way to hurt Jonan? To punish Aten for his part in developing the plague? She didn’t know this man. She had no way or right to judge him. Her crew had already set his city on fire, bombed his family’s only route of escape, and killed uncounted numbers of his uncles, brothers, and sons.

The Thallians had lost. She didn’t need to do this. She couldn’t do this. The future might still come . . .

Of their own accord, Raena’s hands unlocked on Aten’s throat.

Aten opened eyes gone bloodshot to peer at her. Raena sat back on his chest, staring at him, shocked at herself.

He punched her in the head. Luckily, from this angle, the blow didn’t have much speed behind it. She let him overbalance her.

Something crashed down atop Aten and he collapsed over her. Past his shoulder, Raena saw the face of one of the boy clones. Something in his expression told her it was Jim.

He rolled Aten’s body off of her. “Did my uncle hurt you?”

“No more than your father ever did,” Raena said.

“Can you walk?”

Raena allowed him to help her to her feet. “Yes.” The deep bruise made her right thigh quiver, but the leg held her weight.

“They moved the
Veracity
to the rendezvous site,” Jim warned her. He led her to a jet bike and jumped on.

Raena clambered up behind him. She wondered if Haoun still existed in the future, if he would remember her. If he still liked human girls. If the Empire fell, or if it made peace with the Templars. If there was anything familiar worth going back to or if they had destroyed it all.

*   *   *

At some point, they passed out of the city. Raena didn’t notice. They rode until the jet bike ran out of fuel. Then they ran. The next thing that caught her attention was Mykah standing guard near a spire of rock. Dawn was breaking over the mountains.

Mykah hissed when he saw her. Raena wanted to tell him that the damage looked worse than it was, but really, she was worse than she looked, so she kept silent. He put his arm around her waist and took some of her weight off her injured leg.

She forced herself to jog across a wide grassy field. She had disjointed impressions: purple wildflowers spangling the grass; the air alive with birdsong. Yellow sunlight poured warmth over her skin. She’d had no idea how beautiful Drusingyi had been, before the galaxy murdered it. This must be breaking Jim’s heart.

Gisela stood in the doorway of the
Veracity
, covering their approach. She had the sniper rifle upraised, staring through the scope over Raena’s head. Raena didn’t look back to see if she was being followed. She no longer had the strength to care. The people in the past had ceased to be her problem.

Mykah glanced over her shoulder and put on a burst of speed. “We’ve got to go,” he urged.

“Go,” Raena said. “Go back to her.”

“Run!” he ordered.

She didn’t want to. She felt all her years now in the aches in her body, in the heaviness of her heart. She could just lie down here, in the glorious sunshine, and be one with the grasses and flowers. She was done. Let Mykah go home and face down the Templar Master, beg for the survival of humanity.

Mykah kept pulling her forward, increasing the length of his stride. And she ran beside him, calling on the dregs of her strength. The
Veracity
was the only home she had ever loved. She ran for it.

Jim dashed ahead of them. In the ship’s hatchway, he reached back to drag Raena inside. Mykah leapt in after her, pounded his fist down on the lock.

Raena sprawled on the deck, certain that her heart would tear itself apart. Jagged breath cut the inside of her throat.

She lay there, gasping, as the others made the ship ready to leave. She felt the engines powering up.

“Raena, strap down,” Mykah ordered over the comm.

She shook her head, unable to push herself up off the deck.

Something soft brushed her cheek. It was insistent. She opened her eyes to see a Templar leaning over her, stroking an antenna across her face.

The Templar picked her up in its many legs, gently cradling her against its chitinous underside. At this point, she didn’t care if it planned to eat her. She closed her eyes and let herself swoon, but the deep unconsciousness she craved remained out of reach.

The Templar moved to brace itself. It was too big to fit into any of the crash webbing aboard the
Veracity
, but it could wedge itself into the main passageway.

The ship shot upward at a steep angle. That probably meant Kavanaugh was flying. He had been doing it for decades now, maybe longer than Haoun had been alive. As he forced the old ship through a series of punishing evasive maneuvers, adrenaline surged into Raena’s blood despite herself.

“What’s going on?” she shouted forward, but either they were concentrating or they didn’t hear her.

“Fighters from the
Arbiter
are pursuing us,” a voice said. It sounded like a stringed instrument, its voice so low that Raena felt it in her chest.

“Are you speaking to me, Templar?” she asked softly.

“Yes. We have the translation apparatus now.”

The running wasn’t over yet. She had to get up, get into the turret, and man the guns. She had to protect the others.

“Can you help me get aft?”

“Yes.”

The Templar pulled itself through the
Veracity
, carrying Raena along with it. When they reached the turret guns, Raena said, “Let me go now. I will try to convince them to leave us alone.”

She crawled up into the bubble, switching on the comm inside. “Route some power to the guns.”

“We’re going to jump as soon as I can get clear of the asteroids,” Kavanaugh said.

“If you lose me, so be it. I’ll give you a chance to run.”

*   *   *

Jim crept up into the turret with her. He didn’t say anything, just powered up the other gun and climbed in.

He was, unsurprisingly, a good shot. Raena felt better for his company, since the black eye left her completely reliant on the computer targeting. She laid down covering fire and let Jim pick off the fighters coming alongside them. The two of them made a good team.

She wondered if he had any regrets killing these strangers. She couldn’t see the boy’s face, but she imagined he was smiling.

Finally the
Veracity
got out beyond the asteroid belt. Kavanaugh gave the ship her head, letting her run flat out as he calculated the jump back to the Templars’ tombworld.

Mykah came to the base of the turret guns. “Come down,” he said. “We’re clear.”

Raena let Jim go down first. Once he’d gotten out of her way, she called down to Mykah, “Will you catch me? My leg’s frozen up. I can’t manage the climb.”

“I’ve got you,” he assured.

*   *   *

Raena shut herself in her cabin and did not come out to eat. Kavanaugh let her get away with that for one day, then he overrode the lock on her door and let himself in.

She sat in the darkness. One eye had swollen shut. The other glittered in the red power light of her screen.

She’d showered. Some of her fingers were taped together. She’d gotten her cuts and burns bandaged. She sat wound up in the coverlet, but hadn’t bothered to dress. Even in the dimness, he could see the black shadow of an enormous bruise on her thigh. It must go down to the femur.

“Is it broken?” he asked.

“Just bruised.”

Kavanaugh set the tray on her desk, then handed her the cup of tea, double sweet and full of rice milk, the way Mykah said she liked it. Kavanaugh sat beside her on the bed, with his back against the bulkhead.

“You should see the other guy,” she joked quietly.

“Jim said you were fighting the alpha clone.”

She nodded.

“Did you kill him?”

“No.” She sipped her tea. “I had a realization in the middle of the fight. I was going to kill Aten because he looked like Jonan. Because Jonan was evil. Because I couldn’t kill Jonan again.”

“When I was a kid, it was easy to tell the bad guys,” Kavanaugh said. “The Empire was evil. The Coalition said they would protect us. The Templars said they would accept us into the galaxy. And the Thallians stripped away those promises because they killed the Templars and turned the galaxy against us. It must have been difficult to let any of the Thallians live.”

“I told myself I’d changed, but twice now, I’ve gone to Drusingyi and killed nearly everyone I came across, man and boy.” Raena asked despairingly, “How am I different from the monsters?”

“You’ve been trained to be a monster,” Kavanaugh told her, just as quietly. “You’ve loved and been loved by monsters. But the galaxy is just the galaxy. Most of us are only people. We will forgive you for being a monster, as long as you only show us part of who you are. Humanity needs someone to protect it. We need you to fight for us, even if you feel like a monster.”

She shook her head. “I knew if I killed Aten, I was destroying the future. Jonan wouldn’t become the alpha clone. He wouldn’t hunt me down after you got me got out of the tomb. I wouldn’t steal the
Veracity
. Jim probably wouldn’t even have been cloned. Everything that’s happened to me in the last six months would cease to exist.” She sipped her tea. “I held the future in my hands. I wanted so very badly to break it.”

“But you didn’t,” Kavanaugh pointed out. “Jim is still with us. We rescued a Templar Queen and two young females. We can save the Templars after all. We can make things right in the galaxy.”

Raena set the teacup aside and turned to kiss him. Kavanaugh submitted to her. Even injured, she was still strong enough to hurt him, and he didn’t want to be hurt. He wanted the same thing he had always wanted: to fix her. To rescue her. So he let her use him, to prove something to herself.

He had to close his eyes, so he couldn’t see how badly she’d been beaten.

In all the years he’d imagined saving her, it had never been exactly like this. She was gentler than he expected, more invested in the sensation of it than the consummation. He tried to relax into it, let her take what she needed, but it was difficult to separate himself from all the years of fantasies and dreams.

In the end, she was entirely quiet. Afterward, he only held her and asked nothing more. He knew that this would only happen once. Both of them had exorcised their demons. When he saw Ariel again and asked her to marry him, Raena would give them both her blessing. He hoped she would find some peace with Haoun, if only for a while.

Raena curled her head against Kavanaugh’s shoulder, closed her good eye, and went to sleep. His heart broke for her just a little bit more. He kissed her forehead, on the side that wasn’t swollen and bruised.

CHAPTER 18