Insynn_NINE Series 3 Read online

  But his intentions always backfired. He gave the wrong gift, he said the wrong thing and the girl made it public, so the teasing began anew and he was freshly humiliated. Very quickly, Theron learned to not even acknowledge any hint of desire. It was better to remain in the shadows and pine, instead of pursue. Why bother? He already knew the outcome.

  When he was twenty-two, and starting to take part in business deals, Gesminna Ferri was introduced to him: a local socialite, good family, involved in charity work. He was no good at talking to women, or anyone, really. Every conversation was strangled, him panicked on the inside, rehearsing every line, but the words spoken always the opposite of his intention. Ges didn’t seem to mind, though. Then she asked him to take her out for dinner.

  They looked good together, everyone thought so. Ges said he was handsome, though Theron was always quick to deny the compliment; he'd been called ugly so many times growing up, he’d never believe otherwise. But she was beautiful, and she knew it by the way she swung her hips in front of him. Black hair, pale blue eyes, clear copper skin, slim and elegant and cool. She didn’t mind his frequent, awkward silences, or when he had to disappear for days on end. She didn’t mind his sweating palms, or how he fumbled in the dark with her blouse that first time. With her, he was always careful when it came to his seizures and the warning signs: the aura, the haze, the quickening of his heart, all clues to excuse himself and find the nearest washroom, or at least a quiet alcove to brace his body against.

  But one day, it hit too fast. When he came out of it, servants had surrounded him, clucking with fear and sympathy. But Ges was also standing over him.

  “It’s not -” he began in a panic, even as his head was spinning. “I’m not - ”

  “I’m not upset,” she interrupted him. There was a strange, pinched expression on her face. He couldn’t tell what it was: fear, or disgust, or just incomprehension.

  An awkward silence followed, until the servants started to clean up the broken vase on the floor. Ges didn’t crouch down next to him. She just waited until he got to his feet. Only then did she take his arm.

  The next day, a seizure disorder specialist was at his door. The doctors couldn’t do anything more for him, he already knew that, but he went through the tests, the blood withdrawals, the puzzled results, for her.

  After six months, he proposed marriage. She said yes. He was in a state of bliss for days, floating through the motions.

  Then his cousin Jetsun came to his apartment in Lea, on a break from law school. Theron had barely closed the front door before she announced, “You need to know about something. And it’s going to hurt.”

  His heart gave one hard thump. The dream ends, he thought immediately. Too good to be true.

  “I saw Ges on the Express train, all over some man. Everyone saw. She wasn’t even trying to hide it.”

  Of course she wasn’t.

  “I knew it,” Jetsun muttered. “I could tell from the start, what a phony she was.”

  One phony to another.

  Suddenly, Jetsun’s face was in front of his, pink and furious. “She’s embarrassing you in public,” she spat each word. “Do something about it.

  "Like what?” Theron shot back. He leaned against the wall, his head in his hand, wishing he could press his skull hard enough to erase all memory of this moment.

  “If you don’t do something, I will.”

  “Don’t make threats on my behalf,” Theron snapped. “It’s none of your business."

  “Fine,” Jetsun said. “Be a cuckold. See if I care. I try to warn you, get it tossed back in my face, because you’re too much of a coward to do anything.”

  Theron threw an ashtray at her. It crashed through the door’s fine glass design.

  The wind sucked through the hole, making a howling, haunting sound. Jetsun gaped at him, face white with surprise. Then she flounced out of the apartment, kicking aside the broken glass.

  She was right. He was a coward. It took a full day to summon the courage to confront Gesminna. She shrugged when he asked her why, her eyes drifting from his, glazed with boredom.

  Because she can. Because I fulfilled a need until she found something better. Because acquisitions run her life. That’s how things work in this world. Everything has a purpose. And when that’s done, we move on. We consume anew. We never look back.

  There had to be more than that.

  He had to believe that there was more to his life than that.

  So Theron took his inheritance, and left everyone behind.

  Keeping to ground transportation, he travelled through cities and towns and plains, looking for the right amount of distance from Lea and the southeastern coast. Finally, in the North, as far north as he could go on the continent of Osha, he bought a house in Karum that was built into the edge of a cliff. He liked the security of the thick dirt walls, enclosing him on three sides. On the fourth side, he installed floor-to-ceiling windows, so he could always see who might be approaching; he couldn’t quite quit the instinct to be watchful.

  Of course, the Savas knew where he was, of course they did. Still, no one came after him, not enemy nor friend. Just as well.

  Over the next eight years, he dabbled in different trades: engineering, computer hacking, business investments, martial arts. He took university classes remotely, under an assumed name, careful to minimize any personal interactions. He reduced his sleep to less than three hours per night. He meditated, and trained his body to be pliable and light, to feel nothing, to absorb nothing. Being alone became a natural state, and the idea of human touch became foreign, as did any desire for sex after a couple of professional encounters. It wasn’t worth the hassle for temporary, reckless pleasure.

  Instead, he began to make contacts, and take meetings with people across Osha: inventors, enforcers, fight promoters. For what purpose, he didn’t quite know yet, but he had a burning need to find someone who could be loyal to him, and not to the Savas. He spent months looking at bodyguards and bounty hunters, retired law officers and mercenaries, looking for something to click. Nothing happened. No one had any semblance of something special until his meeting with a bounty boss in Queline, deep in the industrial North.

  The boss himself was useless, Theron could tell within five minutes. Theron was on the brink of leaving when the door burst open. Three men dragged a woman inside, shoving her into a wooden chair, binding her arms behind her.

  “Nicely done!” the boss crowed. “Did she give you much trouble?"

  “Nah,” one of the man scoffed. “Easy catch."

  “Amazing bounty for this one,” the boss told Theron. “Even better when they don’t fight.”

  Curious, Theron eyed the woman in the chair. She was slumped over, her hair a hundred shades of blue: navy and aquamarine and sky-blue, jagged and flipping out at her shoulders. She wore gray athletic gear and heavy black boots. And her shoulders were rippling under the fabric.

  She was breaking loose from her bonds, he realized.

  Then her head lifted, and her eyes caught his: pale gray-green, framed with heavy black make-up, ghostly and piercing, furious and terrified.

  There was the scraping sound of wood on wood. The bounty hunters darted forward, and the world became a whirlwind of blood.

  A gunshot rang out. The woman crashed to the floor, framed by the bodies of the three men.

  The boss raised the barrel of his Aegis to fire a final shot into the woman’s skull.

  “Don’t!” Theron burst out, surprising himself.

  The Aegis swung in his direction.

  Theron grabbed the man's arm, pushing the barrel away.

  Somehow, the trigger was pulled. Blood exploded all over Theron’s chest and arms.

  The boss crumbled, the Aegis clattering next to him.

  When the roar died down in Theron’s ears, the woman was the only other person breathing. But Theron couldn’t move, couldn’t blink. His thoughts berated him. You can’t be tied to this. You have to leave. Now. Now!

  She was taking in short, desperate gasps, curled into herself. The ground underneath her was soaked with blood. Theron heard his grandfather’s voice in the back of his head: Don’t be stupid. Move your feet and keep walking. Who cares if she dies?

  No. No, he was better than that.

  Hoisting her into his arms, her boots swinging over his elbow, Theron stepped over the still-warm bodies. His jacket grew warm and wet with her blood, then his dress shirt underneath. It struck him, as he stumbled down the stairs, that this was the first prolonged human touch he’d experienced in years. It was oddly intimate, cradling the woman against his chest, inhaling her foreign sweat, maneuvering through doors.

  Within minutes, she was slumped in the passenger seat in the ground rover he’d rented, the doors locked and the windows drawn. He pressed one hand against the woman’s side, thinking to staunch the flow of blood, but it just oozed between his fingers.

  I need a medlab. And something discreet. Something charitable, somewhere far enough that she won’t get tracked down.

  A quick search of other industrial sites in the North. A brief longing look at the listing for Karum, so far away. Then Theron scanned the Midlands.

  Yes, there, one small, almost imperceptible marker, deep within the plains, a Jala Communia. Jala was a religious faith, he remembered. Service to community. Charitable. They would help.

  He set his destination, and set the rover on auto-drive. One hour. Could she survive that long? As the vessel sped over the pavement, then gravel, then grass, Theron riffled through the woman’s pockets, searching for some kind of identification. A folded piece of paper was in one pocket: a professional fight listing for that date, with someone named Lora Blue with top billing.

  Is this her? he wondered. He glan
ced at her face, half-hidden under the sprawl of blue hair. She was a mess, whoever she was. And she reeked of mekaline. Theron recognized the smell from his cousins.

  Why was she worth so much money? Maybe the bounty was for unpaid drugs? He stuffed the flyer into his pocket and leaned back into his seat, trying not to react to her occasional twitches and moans.

  Finally, a light broke through the black night, the silhouette of a gate, and a stone hut that glowed in the moonlight. He eased the rover behind the curve of a hill and cut the engines. Then Theron checked the pulse at the woman’s throat. Still there, though the breath was strained.

  Hoisting the woman in his arms again, Theron ignored the bald priest’s threats, then pleas for him to leave, pushing his way into the clinic. It was small, and archaic, but it was the best he could do. He laid the woman on the gurney in the back of the clinic. Her eyes were rolled back into her head. She looked dead.

  When he walked outside, the priest came after him, squawking with anger. Theron ignored him. Then the girl showed up. Sydel, looking like a ghostly child in her nightgown. Theron instructed her to get to work, and kept his pace.

  He didn’t stop moving until he was safely ensconced in his house in Karum. He shed the bloody clothes and burned them in the fire pit on the veranda.

  Days later, the woman wandered back into his thoughts, with an unshakable curiosity. It didn’t take long for Theron to uncover information about Phaira Lora Byrne and her tumultuous background: a mix of poverty, loss, and public disgrace. He uncovered correspondence between a law enforcement officer, Aeden Nox, and one of Phaira’s brothers, Renzo; they were arranging the details of renting a Volante transport with the intent of finding Phaira. She had disappeared from her hometown of Daro some weeks ago. He wondered if her brother was still looking for her. Maybe she was on that Volante now.

  When one of his algorithms caught that Jala girl, Sydel, rifling through public records at a Vendor Mill, he made first contact with Phaira. Her voice was different from what he expected, full of anger and paranoia. Theron spent the whole call pacing the length of his house, his arm wrapped around his head, working to keep his voice cold, perplexed as to why he was even compelled to warn her about the breach in security, and even more baffled why he suddenly insisted that Phaira meet him in Daro so he could ‘explain himself.’

  This time, her eyes were clear: a ghostly gray-green against the blue hair. She wore nanotube armor, her back straight as a soldier’s. Her arm muscles were pronounced, her aim unwavering when she pointed a military-grade Calis pistol at him. He could see how she would succeed in the underground fighting circuit, why she drew attention to herself. She refused to believe his story that he was just an innocent bystander when the bounty hunters kidnapped her. But she never pulled the trigger.

  Then a strange coincidence, weeks later; she was in Karum, just minutes from his house of windows, alone, exhausted, and looking for somewhere to hide. And when she came, he saw it again when they sparred, when she met the challenges he tossed at her. Potential.

  She might be an asset, he mused, the partner I’ve been looking for.

  So, on a whim, he offered his house for her sanctuary. And to his surprise, she accepted.

  For one week, their only contact was combat training sessions. She had trained in submissions, and he had focused on energetic redirection over the past eight years, so they both had techniques to teach. It was odd to be so physically close to someone, constantly on the verge of hurting each other, but at the same time learning every point of another’s body. A strange, magnetic ripple grew in the basement, in those nights that they interacted. He couldn’t tell if she felt something too. During the day, when she slept, he would roam the village, the beaches, anything to avoid his confusing fixation with this ex-soldier. Who wasn’t exactly pretty, but when they were in the same room, he couldn’t stop looking at her. Who was cradling his head when he woke from a stress-induced seizure, like she cared about him. Who held no regard for her life when it came to the safety of her dysfunctional family, a kind of devotion he didn’t understand but desperately wanted to.

  Then Phaira crawled through his window in Liera. He’d followed her to the city, bringing her beloved Calis pistols, left in Honorwell after a police raid, and stayed in the same building, just a few floors higher, in a safe house. He couldn’t quite bring himself to leave; he enjoyed the limbo too much, of being neither here nor there.

  Then one night, she appeared in his window. And over seven nights, her cool body was his: her soft moans; the flushed base of her throat; her fingernails in his back; the tiny scars underneath all that dark makeup, how they caught the moonlight when his face was an inch from hers. How she fell asleep next to him on her stomach, her arms over her head, her blue hair a matted mess. As she breathed, he remained on his back and shut his eyes, and though he couldn’t sleep, he remained still, taking in the sensation of someone’s body so close to his.

  Until dawn broke, and she escaped back to her life, floors below. But something had broken open in him, some kind of unexpected, scorching desire, and like a fool, he waited for the night to come, his hands burning for her return.

  To his surprise, in the silences between rushes, she started to talk to him. He learned about her parents, how she was an orphan like him, left to function alone from an early age. They both had troubled father figures, dysfunctional family relationships, and complicated romances that never lasted long. They both fought a persistent restlessness, and a swamping depression. They trusted very few people, having learned that most people were bound to disappoint. Her biggest fear was to make the wrong choice in who to trust, that her mistake would expose her as weak and vulnerable and ashamed. How nervous she was in those moments; how nervous they both were, underneath all the bravado.

  But, too quickly, it was over. He went back to Lea, and she went to the mountains in search of her family. But those nights in Liera resonated, like a film reel rolling in the back of his mind, brought into light when he closed his eyes, when he was smacked by his grandfather’s cane and forced to perform menial housework as punishment for defying the order to return home.

  But just like everything else in his life, the dream was bound to end.

  And it did, three months ago.

  First, that unexpected call from that girl, Sydel, and members of the original NINE group: Cyrah CaLarca and Kuri Nimat. They were calling to make amends. Amends! Theron kept the video dark so they couldn’t see his rage. CaLarca denied any involvement in his family’s death twenty-five years ago, but still apologized for her involvement, which was curious; Kuri had no remorse. When it was done, in the darkness of his apartment, he turned over the facts again and again. Phaira had allowed CaLarca onto her family’s airship, the Arazura. She’d housed the woman, healed her, included her in group decisions, knowing that CaLarca was part of the NINE. Why would she do that? How could she do that?

  It made sense soon enough, when Theron followed her to Macni, or “the Mac” as it was better known, a sprawling city on the East coastline. He watched as she shook hands with Detective Daryn Ozias on the front steps of the local patrol station. Theron recognized the detective immediately; the woman had woven in and out of Sava business for years.

  Phaira was an informant.

  She was manipulating him, and he’d walked into it.

  Of course, his mind lectured. She’s already in league with your worst offenders, why wouldn’t she be aligned with patrol? This whole time, her goal was to expose you and your secrets, to take you down through covert affection. Any logical person would believe that.

  If he were a true Sava, Theron would have her killed for embarrassing him. He would have killed her brothers, too, and anyone else she loved.

  Instead, he pushed it aside. He hadn’t disclosed anything that would hurt him. It was a passing infatuation. A game to play with a girl who was willing. Not worth his time and attention.

  Only at night did Phaira come into his mind, frustrating dreams where he searched for her, just missed her exit from the room. Sometimes it was worse when she actually appeared in the dream, because she was always untouchable, at the other end of a crowd, too many witnesses preventing him from taking hold of her, from kissing her, from throwing her out of the window.

  He woke up sore and exhausted, uncertain of what was real and what was fantasy. He hated those dreams, but he was grateful at the same time. Better that it all came out in dreams. Better that it was cleaned out at night so he could function during the day, without thought, without emotion, without anything to distract him from his purpose.