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Chapter Two

  Tara had woken in a tiny stinking sleep chamber, and to the sounds of sex. It had taken her all of three seconds to know what had happened to her and about fifteen for her to get the bonds holding her undone. The creature leaning over her, a cup of some putrid brew in its hand and wearing a grin that had showed rotting teeth and diseased gums, had been startled by her sudden awakening and even more surprised by her being able to break out of the restraints.

  She’d killed it, of course. She’d known, instinct had told her, that whatever was in that cup it wasn’t good and so she had grabbed it by its scrawny neck and forced the entire contents down its throat.

  What had happened next had horrified her. The thing had begun to seizure and kick, and then it died, but not easily. All around her, from other chambers, came wails of despair and sorrow, screams of agony, and the loud rhythmic slaps and groans of sex. The smell had been overwhelming, and she had run because she had not known what else to do.

  Where the hell was she?

  Wherever it was, it was hell.

  The streets were disgusting and stinking. The beings standing under dim lights, kicking away the odd rat and some kind of snake, with a telling ease terrified her. That they were so used to doing that…and the other things that she saw them doing, made her sick. She’d stumbled past what looked like a shootout, and she had narrowly escaped being shot to death with a laser that had bounced off the dripping stone of the world around her.

  She ran up in an alley, too scared to do anything more than stand there and try to get her breath back. Her feet, bare and slicked with the filth and grease, stilled and she leaned against a wall, keeping her eyes peeled for snakes and rats.

  Her mind had closed down—everything but the need to run, to get away—and had kept her from thinking too much, but now she needed to think, to try to figure out where she was and how to get out of there.

  Get home.

  Oh God, she had to get home!

  Panic hit, sweeping away everything before it. Tara could remember nothing beyond that romantic dinner that she had been enjoying with her fiancé, Jack, on the pleasure planet, Orbital.

  She had wanted to go; she could remember that. Pleasure planets were incredibly expensive, and she had winced at the cost even as she had been thrilled by Jack having planned such a special thing for the two of them. She knew that it was completely out of character for him as well; Jack was constantly concerned with how many credits they had and still needed in order to have any kind of life on their home planet of Newport.

  They lived in Newport City, the first colonized section of the planet. Newport still had vast lands, particularly toward the Western rim of the planet, but most of the colonization and civilization remained in Newport City and in several larger satellite cities, all of which formed a sort of glistening horseshoe shape around the massive glacier-fed lake filled with the sparkling clean water that made the planet so desirable.

  Newport had been claimed by the Federation for its under-officers many centuries before. As a result, many of its inhabitants either were in the service of the Federation or were employed in many of its civilian operations.

  Her job, as a common record-keeper, had not paid very well. Jack was an oversight manager, and his job required many hours of tedious and boring choosing one of old records, some of them still on long-obsolete systems, in order to ensure that the Federation’s financial health was consistently good.

  Her job was even more boring. Her job was simply to log the dead on outlying planets, plugging their life and death records into broader mainframes in order to prevent identity fraud, which was rampant throughout the universe. It was a job that she had been doing since she had turned sixteen, the typical age in which a citizen of Newport who was not well off enough to afford to pay for university, or bright enough for the Federation to give them free education, went to work.

  Tara’s parents, before their retirements and then their deaths, had likewise been clerks and record-keepers. Jack’s father was a retired Federation under-officer with little rank or credit pension but who had been given a very nice and solid house for his service—a house that was right in the center of Newport’s bustling downtown section.

  Downtown Newport contained all of the amenities and excitement of the city itself and Tara, who had grown up in one of the small villages inhabited by those who worked within the city but could not afford its pricey rents or home prices, had always wanted to live there.

  The house owned by Jack’s father and mother had, in addition to a small and well-tended lawn behind it, a lovely former gardening shed that Jack had converted into a small one-bedroom dwelling. She had moved in with him there, not even minding that the place was small and cramped or that it was impossible to actually prepare meals within the building due to its poor ventilation.

  She loved living so close to everything and living in the city. She loved Jack and their small and sometimes inconvenient but incredibly wonderful home.

  The trip to Orbital—she couldn’t remember now, as she stood shivering in the stinking alley, why they had decided to go at all. She could remember discussing it with him, sitting over a cup of brewed mock-tea in a small café that specialized in that drink and in whiffs of pure oxygen. Both of those things were incredibly expensive too, and it was a pleasure they indulged in only a single time a month and long after the fashionable crowd had gone home to their lofts. The café tended to mark down prices right before closing, but Jack had always said the tea was the same no matter what time of evening they drank it. It wasn’t, of course. It was brewed strong and bracing early on and the more it was served, the more it was watered down, but Jack being by her side, and their plans to save their credits to buy a place of their own, made her overlook that small fact.

  She’d protested going to Orbital, of course. The cost had been exorbitant, and she had been terrified that it would cost them not just those credits, but the time that it would take to re-accrue those credits again. Part of her had known that they could not live in that tiny little building forever and she longed, she truly did, to have one of the stunning loft-style apartments in the sky-scraping buildings that towered over the street upon which the café sat.

  What on earth had happened to her on Orbital?

  Damned if she knew.

  Her memory seemed to stop somewhere between the sweet wine that Jack had poured into her glass and her first bite of some delicacy whose name she could not recall and whose taste had been oddly acidic and slightly alkaline.

  Just as she thought she was safe and that she had a minute to breathe and to figure out what was happening, she saw it.

  It was a human, or it had been at one time. As it came closer, revulsion began in the back of her throat. She’d heard of humans who had had their bodies deformed and mutated by the pressures of space and planets not their own. Newport had been so much like Old Earth in its atmosphere, gravity, and so on that the physiology of the humans there had remained largely unchanged from the physiology they had enjoyed upon their originating planet.

  This human though…

  Was it a human?

  Could it possibly be human?

  It was so pale and its skin so shiny that it looked almost as if it was wearing a human-costume. There was a notable hump on its back and its face, when it lifted it momentarily from the ground, was all hollow cheeks, sunken eye sockets, and a wide shelf of lower jaw that looked as thick and heavy as a brick.

  And it was shuffling and snuffling down along the ground, scooting along now on all fours. The sight revolted her even further, but it also baffled her. What the hell was it? No—it was a male. It was a he, she saw as her brain finally kicked in and began to put the pieces together. This human male that had somehow become deformed was down on the ground, and it was clear that he was looking for something, but what?

  Her blood froze in her veins.

  Could he be looking for her? Sweat broke out on her brow. She could smell it, slick and salty. The defor
med man’s head popped up. His eyes, bulging and glassy, rolled around in their sockets and she shrank back, yet again praying to every deity she had ever heard of that it would not see her or smell her or somehow sense her.

  Sickness rolled up in her belly and floated toward her tongue. The rank smell lying so thick on the air finally hit her full-force, and more sickness came up, burning her throat with its acid. She clutched at the stones of the wall, trying to keep herself both upright and out of sight but the feel of the stones, their spongy texture and dampness, was too much for her to take. She yanked her hands away and pressed them into her sides

  The deformed human stood. His hands, long and shovel-like, flipped up in the air and his head went back. She saw his nostrils flare widely, flapping open and shut as he sniffed the air, swiveling his head around on his stalk of a neck.

  I’m going to die. There’s no other way around it. He’s going to kill me. Either he’s some kind of human-mutt mix that they use to track down people that escaped from whatever that place was, or he’s feral. Like a wild beast, that kind of feral, and he’s going to kill me and eat me.

  Those thoughts raced through her brain. So did one word, lighting up in bright color flashing before her eyes like a sign from the very heavens. Run. She told herself that even as she saw the word form before her eyes. She had to run. But she was frozen solid, stuck there and unable to even breathe anymore.

  She was so terrified by the appearance of this strange thing, this mutated human, that all she could do was stand right there while the snakes on the ground slithered closer to her feet and the human came even closer to her, still sniffing the air and clearly excited now.

  Then a shadow detached itself from the low roof of the building behind the deformed human. It moved off the roof and upright so swiftly that for a moment she was sure she was imagining it.

  He came down off the roof, something glittering in one hand. He landed on the deformed human, and it went down with a low grunt and cry, and then it was lying still on the stones in a spreading pool of dark fluid that she only vaguely registered as blood.

  Tara stared at the man who had just killed the deformed human. He was tall and incredibly hard to see because of the shadows. The stink of blood and fear overwhelmed her. He spoke into the darkness around her in a low and sultry baritone voice that sent shivers racing down her spine despite the seriousness of the situation. “If they find you, they will kill you. I would suggest you run, but if you run to the east, you will run right into his clan, and they will smell his blood upon your feet and kill you. If you run to the west, you’ll be running back to whatever it was you ran from. To the north, there is a turf war going on, and you would get caught within it and die. Clearly, you’re no fighter.”

  She finally found her voice. Her practical streak reared its head, and she said, “Then perhaps south would be the best choice.”

  Had she really just said that? It seemed she had and while it obviously was the most practical, and in fact the only, choice it still seemed utterly insane that she could make such a remark after first having killed some creature that she had never seen before and then having witnessed the death of the deformed human.

  And that death had been so swift, and so silent.

  A new thought formed in her head and words came out before she could stop them. “Are you an assassin?”

  He said, “I’m in a hurry to not be assassinated. I’m headed south. I do not need you to slow me down. If you can keep up, you can follow me. But I won’t be responsible for you. Do you understand?”

  What lay to the south? She had no idea. She did know that she couldn’t go back the way she’d come and she most certainly didn’t want to meet anyone connected to the dead thing on the ground either.

  He took off down the alley, right toward the blank wall that she had spotted earlier when she had run inside the alley. That wall had stopped her headlong flight and sent her back toward the mouth of it, all up until she had seen that creature. She opened her mouth to call out to him that there was a wall there but just then he reached and began to scale it easily.

  She muttered, “And my mother never allowed me to climb on things when I was young either. It just figures.”

  She raced down the alley, hoping that there was some sort of handholds in the wall. He was at the top, flattened down along it. She scrabbled for purchase, found none, and looked up. He had shrunk back into the shadows. The wall, while not very thick, was wide enough that he could dangle off the side of it. He dropped one arm toward her and hissed, “Come on if you are coming.”

  Oh, she was definitely going. She had to jump as high as she could with one hand stretched up and over her head in order to reach his hand. His fingers caught her wrists, and her feet slid and scrambled on the stones of the wall.

  The stones were so smooth, and she had no idea how he had managed to scale that wall that way, and she didn’t really care either. He was tugging her upward, levering himself over the wall and using the weight of his body dangling off the other side to help her come up it. She finally reached the top and grasped it with both shaking hands.

  The sound of him hitting the ground never came, and she hung there, puzzled for a moment before peeking over the side of the wall to see him already moving, heading away from the wall and toward the dim street just beyond. She managed to swing her legs over the top of the wall and then she stared at the long drop down the other side. What if she fell? What if she broke her neck and died? Worse, what if she fell and broke her neck but didn’t die?

  If the ones who had captured her and the ones who were clan to the dead thing behind her did something really horrible to her, that would end in a painful death that would not come soon enough to spare her excruciating pain and terror.

  Just then his figure turned and came back. He hissed up at her, “I’m wasting time on you.”

  “Then why did you come back?”

  His answer was terse. “Damn if I know. Come on!”

  She managed to turn herself so that she was facing the wall. She hung to that side of it now, and the empty air below her feet shocked her back into paralysis. What if, what if, what if? So many things could go wrong, and she could die or be harmed in a way that would mean she would not escape!

  His fingers yanked at her ankles, and she kicked, her first instinct for survival. He whispered, “Goddammit I am leaving you if you don’t drop right now.”

  “I’m scared.” The words came out in a miserable groan. Her fingers cramped and stiffened. Dread curled and coiled in her guts. She had to go but she could not do it, could not fall into that emptiness below her.

  He spoke again, and his words were a command. “Let go.”

  “I’m scared.” She was. She was so scared she could not let go even though her arms felt like they were being pulled right out of the sockets of her shoulders and her fingers were beginning to lose their grip.

  Warm fingers met her ankles again. That touch was so vital and real that it blew the shock away from her brain. This man was alive. This was real. The whole thing was real, and that small part of her that had thought that maybe it was all just some kind of horrid dream ripped and tore, and she understood without a doubt that this was real.

  Those fingers tautened down, and then they gave a sharp tug. Tara barely managed to squelch a scream as she tumbled down toward the ground below. His arms went around her waist, swinging her in a slight circle before settling her feet back on the ground. He spoke softly, “You have no shoes.”

  She said, “I do not know what became of them. I do not know how I got here. I have no idea of even where I am.”

  He said, “You must watch for the snakes. They’re poisonous. One striking and you’ll be dead before I can even catch you as you fall to the ground. Now run, and stay with me. If you value your life, if you want to live, stay with me.”

  His touch, so strong and so manly, sent shivers racing through her body and heat flushing all up and down her thighs. Instantly guilt hit. Wha
t the hell was she thinking? She was engaged, and to Jack.

  Jack!

  For God’s sake, what happened to Jack? Was he too a prisoner here?

  Her savior’s fingers wound around hers, and she was jerked forward and onward. They pelted down the street and then up very high and steep stairs. Stars danced before her vision, and she kept stumbling. She gagged out, “I can’t! I can’t run up the stairs anymore! I have to stop!”

  As she spoke the words, she turned her head slightly and what she saw horrified her. They had probably only climbed fifty or maybe sixty steps by then, but even from there she could see the vast netting that covered the dark and gloom-shrouded city below. It was a laser net! She had heard of such things, read of them in some reports, but she had never seen one in action. Newport was a peaceful planet; one whose military might was so well-known that none dared to try to invade it. To do so would be to bring down the entire might of the Federation upon the invaders.

  She could see just how sprawling and huge that city was. It was vast. It was dark, and not just dark as in an absence of light—although there was a marked absence of light—but it gave off from malevolent, pulsing energy that she could feel against her skin. It fairly screamed of wickedness and wrongs. Of sin, of death and murder.

  Her rescuer said nothing. His hand gripped hers, and he dragged her onward. She resisted at first but then realized that all she was doing was impeding his progress, and if she continued to do that, he might very well leave her there. She hastened her steps and then just as they reached another high plateau up on the cliffs, she collapsed again, sinking onto the ground and taking deep breaths as she braced herself up on her knees and one hand. “Please,” she sobbed out. “Please, just give me one minute to breathe.”

  He said, roughly, “I cannot. Look down.”

  She did and immediately wished she had not. There were lights flaring toward the sides of the cliff. There were shouts and the sounds of weapon fire. Lasers hit right below where they were perched and she knew that they were aiming upward but that the netting, designed to keep people out, was the only thing that stood between them and the weapons being fired at them. She gained her feet so fast it was as if somebody had put a spring in her body and then snapped it. She started to run, and passed him in her haste. He caught up easily and then they were flying up one more long and terrifyingly steep stairwell.