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Chapter Text

“Raven!” Jasper’s voice crackled out of the station comms. “Looks like your boyfriend’s back! His ship just dropped out of the transfer point.”

Raven sat back on her heels and pushed up her face shield to wink at Gina, who was working on a small land speeder one bay over. Gina rolled her eyes. Raven called out toward the comm, “Which one?”

“That hunter freak.” Jasper’s voice dripped disdain, barely masking a roiling stew of admiration and envy. “Roan.”

Raven stood up, trying hard to ignore the sudden pounding in her chest and the tingling in her palms. Roan. A little too old for her and a lot too dangerous for her station-loving ass, he had a body built for war and a lover’s sleepy eyes. His fleeting layovers at Mecha Station left her walking carefully for days afterward, every step reminding her how good it felt to be fucked hard and long by someone who wasn’t afraid he would break her.

She placed the arc welder carefully in its spot on her tool trolley and pulled off her heavy gloves. “We’ve all got to make a living, Jasper.”

“He catches mutants on the outer rim and sells them to rich bastards in Trikru or Azgeda who want exotic pets in their personal zoos. It’s one step up from slavery.”

“It’s better than the ones who chop them up to sell the body parts for boner pills,” Raven replied, and then she frowned. “When did you get worried about mutant rights?”

Jasper didn’t answer, station needs probably calling his attention away from baiting Raven, so she looked to Gina and raised her brows in question.

Gina straightened from bending over a rickety old engine, brushing her unruly curls back from her face with her arm as she stood up. “That new refugee family, from Montovetero. The Vies?”

Raven nodded at her, recognizing the name.

“They have a pretty daughter, about Jasper’s age.” Gina fluttered her eyelashes at Raven, and sing-songed, “Her name is Maya.”

“Maya, huh?” Raven snickered back, understanding dawning.

“Yeah. The whole family was with the resistance, real do-gooder humanitarian types. But Arcadia ordered everyone out after they conquered the system, even folks like the Vies who'd been their allies in the fight against the Oligarchs. Said no one who lived on the ground was innocent and they’d all had too many chances already.”

Raven shivered, remembering. The Arcadian Declaration of Occupation was a model of cold simplicity.

“The planet Montovetero is ours by right of conquest. All previous inhabitants are hereby declared criminal trespassers and are subject to immediate deportation.”

Not that Raven could dredge up much sympathy for the now-toppled Oligarchs of Montovetero. They’d been arrogant, grasping, and cruel, and had no friends. They’d wielded galaxy-wide power only because the oldest known clusters of transfer points – the wormholes that linked all known habitable regions of the galaxy – originated in their solar system.

Exploiting the shit out of their good luck, the Oligarchs had raked their share and more off the top of everything that travelled through their network of transit hubs. They got away with it as long as they did because it was easier to put up with them than to figure out how to dislodge them.

Right up until they got into a pissing match with the Arcadian Republic.

Once a factory colony of theirs, Arcadia had successfully broken away and formed their own independent system almost a century ago. But in recent decades the Oligarchs had attempted to sever the connections between the Arcadian Republic and the rest of the galaxy, ostensibly to jack up their tariffs on Arcadia’s most profitable exports. In truth, it had been a transparent ploy to re-colonize Arcadia on the cheap, with debt as the weapon of choice.

The Arcadians had endured dreadful hardships as they struggled to preserve their independence. Ultimately, they had declared war. Then, and much to the amazement of the inhabitants of rest of the galaxy, the Arcadians had won. Decisively and overwhelmingly. Afterwards the Arcadian Republic claimed all of Montovetero, and its extensive hub network, for themselves.

Ruthless armed sweeps of the planet surface followed, and the remaining population was forcibly deported, sent off to work and live on newly terraformed planets in the Azgedan System. The only exceptions were a privileged few in the Montoveterian Resistance, people like the Vie family. They alone had been allowed to choose their new homes, assuming they could find a place that would take them in.

Places like Mecha Station. Floating along at minor transit points far from the center, pale echos of the great intersystem hubs, the rag-tag independent stations of the galaxy’s fringes offered commerce and repair to anyone who happened by. They owed fealty and taxes to no system. And received nothing from them in return. It wasn’t a way to get rich, but it was a way to be left alone. The people who lived on them, like the people on Mecha, liked it that way. Liked being too small and much too far out along an outer spiral to matter to the great central powers.

Raven shuddered at the prickling along her spine and flicked her fingers in the ancient gesture to ward off the evil eye. She was much too well-educated to believe in tempting fate merely by having bad thoughts, of course, but she figured a little gesture of appeasement never hurt.

“Raven!” Jasper’s voice broke into her musings on galactic politics and ancient superstitions. He sounded all business now. “Your hunter’s ship is wobbling. Looks like he took one hell of a pounding from something.” Jasper’s tone took on more than a little smug satisfaction. “Maybe the mutants finally fought back.”

“Can he dock it?” Raven asked, not at all interested in the how-it-got-damaged question at the moment.

“I’m asking him to hold off and wait for a docking grapple. Can you come up to ops and handle that?”

“Sure. Heading your way now.”

An hour later, Raven relaxed her shoulders and released the controls. Roan’s small ship was now safely nestled in a repair bay outside Maintenance Sector, mooring stabilizers firmly attached, and the airlock tube would be sealed in just another few minutes.

Laser burns and pulsar scores were visible all along the ship’s starboard hull and the starboard thrusters were completely fried, which had made standard docking impossible. Jasper, somewhat to her surprise, because his mouth so often got ahead of his perfectly sound brain, had been right. Someone, and probably not mutants, had definitely been shooting back this time.

A faint bell sounded and a green flashing light indicated that the airlock seal was good. Raven scooted over to Jasper’s station and elbowed him out of the way to take the comm headset. “What the hell did you get into out there?” she demanded. “Your ship practically has holes in it!”

“Hey to you too, Raven,” Roan replied. He sounded tired, she thought. Woozy even, his deep voice almost slurring his words. And not in the good way, like when he whispered desire across her skin. In the bad, ‘I might pass out soon,’ way.

Shooting a furious glare at Jasper for not saying anything sooner, Raven said, “Are you okay? You sound terrible! I’m sending a doc to you.”

By the time she realized Roan hadn’t protested she was standing outside the airlock waiting for Jackson. Without pausing a second longer, she banged the release and headed in.

He was sprawled limply in the pilot’s chair, half twisted as though he’d planned to stand up but had changed his mind at the last minute and decided to take a little nap instead.

Or his mind had changed for him.

The skin on his prominent cheekbones was pale, almost bluish, under his usually healthy tan, and the pallor made his close-trimmed beard stand out even more sharply than usual in contrast. A small emergency oxygen cylinder was rolling at his feet.

Raven realized abruptly that the air was bad. One of the pulsar hits must have taken the oxygen scrubbers off line. She could feel her lungs prickling and she shook her head, forcing blood flow to keep her brain clear.

Once she reached his side she saw that he was also injured. A nasty-looking laser burn had torn across his hip and lower abdomen, splashing off the bottom edge of his body armor and shredding the jumpsuit below. Against the dark fabric she couldn’t see any bloodstains, but fresh wetness, glistening slick and shiny in the bright lights of the station reflecting through the windows told her all she needed to know. The wound had re-opened, or perhaps never closed at all.

“Roan!” she cried as she shook him vigorously, immensely relieved to see his eyelids fluttering in response. “What the fuck did you get into?”

* * * *

“Hey,” Raven strode through doorway of medbay, grinning happily as soon as she saw Roan sitting up on the examine table. “Doc says you’re good to go, and lucky as hell. Little deeper and you’d have bled out, little lower and you could have kissed any future progeny goodbye.”

She thrust out the duffle bag she’d found on his ship and filled with a change of clothes. “I brought you some fresh gear.”

“Thank you,” Roan swung off the bed and reached for the bag. His color was back to normal and his movements were as graceful as ever. “Tell me about my ship? How bad is it?”

His ship was a small prowler, built to take almost any environment and to withstand the pressures of close-in flight, planets, asteroids, moons, and other assorted space junk. Or ship-to-ship combat. Designed for up to a four-person crew, it could easily be managed by a single pilot. It was an excellent choice for someone in Roan’s line of work. So good, in fact, that other hunters had tried – and failed at least twice – to steal it.

Raven had been taking care of it for years now, and Roan had been flatteringly willing to let her install a number of aftermarket modifications of her own. As a result, she had an almost proprietary interest in the little ship, and she tended to take any damage to it quite personally.

“It’s bad,” she said, with maximum disapproval. “You let someone tear the shit out of the starboard side. But,” she folded her arms and smirked at him, “because you have me, it will be back up and running in no time.”

He paused poking through his bag to grin at her. “I never doubted it.”

While she went on give him her recommendation and estimates for repairs, she covertly examined him for the state of his own injuries.

Doc Jackson had done good work, she decided. She could barely see the residual pinkness of the new skin graft that wrapped from just below Roan’s navel around nearly to his hip. Jackson had even tinted the narrow strip to look the same warm tan as the rest of Roan’s torso, courtesy of the sun lamps he used for both vitamin D and to keep his diurnal cycles regulated.

Raven also enjoyed the show as he tugged off what remained of his damaged undershirt and then pulled on a fresh one. The broad expanse of his shoulders gave plenty of play to the muscles rippling under the smooth skin of his back. Almost making up for the fact he was putting on a shirt at all. For naturally slim man not all that much taller than average, he had truly impressive musculature. The result, she knew, of devoting most of his transit time to a nearly manic training regimen.

He insisted that he trained only to ‘stay fit.’ Raven, once she learned what his workouts actually involved, mentally translated that to ‘trains like a man who’s life depended on it.’ Which it did. Given the nature of his work.

She let her gaze linger as he leaned over to unlace and toe off his boots before peeling down of the rest of his bloodied jumpsuit and then stepping into the fresh one she’d brought him.

“So, less than ten hours to get the oxygen scrubbers rebooted and the thrusters repaired?” he confirmed, looking over at her as he tied off the arms of the jumpsuit around his waist, anxiety and relief warring in his expression.

“Yep. Ten hours or less, with a full crew. Probably. Assuming we don’t find anything new once we take the panels completely off.” She never liked to promise miracles. She preferred to unveil them as a surprise. “And you? You’re all patched up? Breathing properly?”

“Yes.” He nodded reassuringly at her, “All good. It looked worse than it was. The doctor was right. I was lucky. Of course,” he shrugged as he pulled his shoulder length hair into its usual tieback, “I also have excellent reflexes and expensive armor. Speaking of which,” his expression grew more serious, “can you repair it?”

He nodded at the pile of black gear stacked on the next examining table.

Raven sorted through it until she found the damaged midsection. Lifting it up to the light, impressed with the lightness and flexibility of it, she shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. I’ve never worked with this kind of gear.” She glanced back over her shoulder, “I don’t suppose you kept the specs or the owners manual?”

“Um….” he tried for a rueful smile but mostly ended up looking worried, “no?”

Raven rolled her eyes at him and returned to examining the deep score along the front bottom edge. The armor had caught and deflected the brunt of the pulsar blast, but it had left behind a dense spider web of cracks snaking across the front third of the vest. Running her fingers along the barely roughened edges, she recognized that it was fabricated from very high quality materials.

Leaning closer, trying to guess at the composition, she noticed that the matte-black surface was crackling and flaking away along the deepest of the fine cracks. When she flicked at a loose bit with her thumbnail, she realized it was a topcoat. Rubbing more of it away with the pads of her fingers revealed a little of the original color underneath – a shiny, deeply saturated pale blue, a very distinctive blue. A blue that everyone who followed any part of galactic news would immediately recognize as the color of House Azgeda, the absolute monarchy that ruled over the largest, and most rapidly expanding, system of central planets.

She looked back at him, flexing the piece in her hands, lifting it to smell the broken edge, checking for a very distinctive chemical odor she was now certain she’d find. And she did.

Raven narrowed her eyes. “This wouldn’t be military grade, by any chance, would it? Azgedan make, maybe?”

His expression hardly changed and he kept busy repacking his gear, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop rapidly. When he looked up at her, she noticed for the first time that his eyes were nearly the same shade of blue. “Yes. It is. You can pick up all kinds of things on the outer rim. Including military surplus.”

Raven nodded, telling herself that the odd coolness that had settled over them was a natural result of her learning that he had possession of highly restricted and tightly regulated armor. “I’ll do my best with what I’ve got,” she promised, “but I won’t be able to fully duplicate these materials. They guard this chemical formula like it’s worth more than life itself.”

“Then could I buy you dinner first?” His eyes and smile were warm again and Raven let go the momentary weirdness.

He was a hunter and a drifter, she reminded herself. One who made a lot of profit pursuing his dangerous – if ethically dubious – trade, Of course he bought the best black-market gear he could afford. And paid to have it modified for the required custom fit. And it had just saved his fine ass. Worth whatever he’d paid for it.

“It’s going to cost you a lot more than dinner, my friend,” she told him with mock severity, “but,” and she grinned, “dinner is a good start.”

Jackson appeared and informed them that Roan was free to go. “Just be careful for twenty-four hours,” he gave them both an arch look. “Not too much strain on the skin grafts or they’ll pull and scar.”

Roan nodded, slinging his duffle bag over his shoulder and settling the long strap across his chest with a quick rolling shrug.

“Not to worry, doc,” Raven said, hooking her hand through Roan’s arm and pulling him toward the door. She smiled brightly at Jackson as they passed him on the way out. “I’m a total top!”

As they turned toward the commercial strip, Roan leaned close and, almost purring into her ear, murmured, “Demanding and ‘top’ aren’t the same thing, you know.”

His quiet, rumbling voice did things to her, setting nerves alight that made her shiver in anticipation of the rest of the night. Raven caught his eyes and grinned. “You wish,” she said.

“Fine,” he said, letting his gaze drift from her eyes to her mouth to her chest before he raised his eyes back to hers and smiled, cocky and certain. “You are the very best top I’ve ever fucked senseless.”

But then his knowing smirk faded and the expression in his eyes turned to regret. “And much as I’m looking forward to doing it again, not this layover. I should leave as soon as my ship is repaired. In fact, I’m willing to pay the premium for overtime, and a bonus for speed. Tonight, if you can find a crew to take the job, so I won’t be cutting out anyone else in line tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Raven said. “Okay.” Trying, and probably failing, to keep her smile from dimming, she added, “I can always use the money.”

“Thank you,” he said gravely, pulling her closer, trapping her wrist between his body and his arm, and placing his large, warm hand over hers to keep her from letting go.

As if she’d ever had the slightest intention of doing something so revealing.

“I appreciate your willingness to take on the job at the last minute,” he added.

“Why the rush? What did you get into anyway? You still haven’t told me,” she reminded him, leaving her hand right where it was, tucked snugly through his arm, her fingers wrapped around his bicep, her ego soothed by his gently stroking thumb.

“This particular cargo is quite valuable, especially in the right hands,” he replied. “I got hit by poachers right after I secured it. They tried to take it away from me.” His satisfied smirk was more than a little malevolent. “They failed. Unfortunately,” and his shrug was cavalier, “I don’t think they’ll be the only ones to try.”

Raven reminded herself that he sounded smug because he was a smug bastard. That’s what had caught her attention in the first place, when he’d first shown up in need of a repair on his ship and dismissed the cause as a minor accident. She’d learned later that he’d been hit by one of the crews that preferred to ‘hunt’ mutants that other hunters had already caught and put into cryostorage.

Roan had kept his cargo. The people who tried to take it from him ended up selling their ship for salvage, after they’d had it towed back to Mecha Station.

“So that’s why you were such a dick about checking out your cryotank,” she said.

He’d insisted on confirming that his latest prize was still safe and sound before allowing her and Jackson to help him onto the medbay gurney. She’d called him names and he’d ignored her until he was sure the tank was functional, and its contents still alive.

“Yes. That’s why I was a dick,” he agreed, a quick flash of humor crossing his face, “To the right buyer, this cargo is worth more than all the rest of my hauls put together. So I’m not the only one hunting it. Which is the reason I’d like to be as far away from Mecha station as I can, and as soon as possible.” He bent his head and slowed their steps to catch her eyes. “Far away from you. Before anyone else catches up with me. I don’t want anyone hurt in the crossfire.”

His gaze was too serious, too full of potential meaning for Raven to process. So she grinned saucily and bumped his arm with her shoulder instead. “That is the most gallant raincheck I’ve ever received.”

“Thank you,” he repeated. Then his brows knitted, “I think?”

Raven laughed at his struggle to find the most polite way to respond and, after another moment of mildly self-conscious confusion, he chuckled too and allowed her tug him back into motion.

She let him pay for a meal with real, vat-grown meat rather than any of the vegetarian substitutes, and she insisted on real coffee and chocolate cake for desert.

“If I’m going to be working on your ship all night, it’s the least you can do,” she told him, enjoying the warmth of his smile and the pleasure in his eyes as he watched her from across the small table, and happy to stretch the moment as long as she could.

Back in Maintenance Sector, Raven called her boss and got his permission to invite (“Invite, not order,” Sinclair stressed) as many other techs as she needed to complete the repairs on Roan’s ship. Sinclair needn’t have worried. Roan had a solid history with them of paying cash in full and not quibbling over the cost. It was the kind of rep that earned him extraordinary service when he needed it, especially with a promised bonus in the offing.

With a full four-man crew on deck, Raven and Roan suited up to head out for a personal inspection of his ship’s outer hull. They helped each other dress while the rest of her crew got busy with interior wiring. Fastening the last of the seals at his cuffs, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease him. “You sure this isn’t part of some secret seduction plan after all?”

“What?” He looked completely baffled, and a little disconcerted.

“I know I told you once that spacewalking is even better than sex, and here you are, giving me a chance to get some tonight.”

He relaxed and adopted an offended expression. “You told me I proved you wrong.”

“Did I?” She batted her eyelashes at him.

“Another time,” he leaned close, well into her personal space, “I would prove you wrong again.”

She met his eyes, struck again by their color, and their heat. She raised a challenging eyebrow. “Big words.”

“Not at all. A guarantee.”

He leaned even closer. Raven let her lips fall open just the slightest bit, anticipating and inviting his kiss. He tilted his head, let his gaze fall to her mouth, and then rocked back onto his heels and winked at her. “See you in the black,” he said, and pulled on his helmet.

“Ass,” she muttered, pulling on her own helmet and reaching for her tool bag.

Roan’s ship broke away from Mecha Station and vanished through the transit point early in the day watch. It was fully functional, if more dinged up than usual, and his body armor was patched and sealed.

“You’ll have to find a true armorer to really restore it to factory specs,” Raven had said as she handed it back. “This is ugly, and probably won’t take the same kind of direct hit as the rest, so, you know,” she caught his gaze briefly, “be careful.”

His fingers on her cheek startled her, but when he brushed them down to catch her chin and lift her mouth to his she was smiling.

“I will,” he murmured just before he kissed her.

* * * *

“Well, that certainly explains it.” Gina’s voice broke in on Raven’s concentration.

“Explains what?” Raven said, frowning at her tool bench. Roan had been gone for more than an hour and she still couldn’t decide if she should start a new project or call it a day and go home for some much needed sleep.

“Why Finn Collins left to join that terraforming crew headed for the Azgeda System.”

Raven looked at Gina. “What are you talking about?”

“That completely stunned look on your face. Ever since Roan kissed you. In the middle of your work area, I might add,” Gina grinned teasingly at Raven. “It explains why Finn left. He knew you didn’t love him anymore.”

“Since I knew he didn’t love me anymore as soon as he started crushing on that pink-haired girl at the art shop, I don’t know why my love for him was or was not the deciding factor,” Raven pushed back from the bench. “Besides, I’m not sure Roan will be back.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. He’s never kissed me goodbye before.” Or told her that he’d captured the cargo of a lifetime. The kind that could set him up anywhere. And almost everywhere had to be nicer than here. Raven blinked against the unexpected wetness in her eyes, and finally allowed herself to articulate the feelings she’d been swallowing for the last hour, “I think that was goodbye, goodbye. The ‘I’m not coming back, goodbye’.”

In the end, she decided to go home and sleep. Maintenance was slower than usual at the moment and Sinclair assured her they could get on without her.

Six hours later, the shrilling of her personal comm unit woke her from a deep sleep.

It was Sinclair, calling her in.

“Why?” she groaned. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“Sorry,” he said, “It’s an Arcadian Fleet scout ship. Really banged up. Been in some kind of firefight. And they’re in a huge hurry about something or other.”

By the time she made it to the main maintenance bay, Raven had coached herself into a smooth calm face. Because there could be no possible connection between Roan’s damaged ship and this one. He’d said poachers, not Arcadian military. It was all just a fantastic coincidence.

“Raven!” Sinclair was waiting for her just inside the main doors. The lean, broad-shouldered stranger standing next to him was wearing the deep navy fatigues of the Arcadian Marines. Sinclair smiled tightly at her as he jerked his head at the taller man. “This is Captain Blake. He has a few questions for you.”

Raven nodded briefly, immediately aware of Sinclair’s unease. Also, his call had been a ruse. She tried for a bright, cooperative smile. “Sure, ask away.”

Captain Blake glanced between her and Sinclair, his large dark eyes appraising them both. Raven was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like whatever conclusion he reached.

“Perhaps a more private place for us to talk?” Blake said to Sinclair, his voice unexpectedly deep and resonant in the clatter of maintenance.

Nope, Raven decided, she really didn’t like this. Not one damn bit.

“Of course,” Sinclair said. “Would our break room do?”

Blake agreed and they followed Sinclair to the small room off the main bay. At the entrance Blake turned to Sinclair and said, “I don’t want to keep you from your regular business, sir.”

Sinclair shrugged. “My business includes being present when foreign military officers question one of my people.”

Raven wanted to hug him despite the ruse.

Blake didn’t press the issue.

As soon as they were seated, Blake turned to Raven. “We’re following the trail of the bounty hunter who landed here yesterday and left this morning. We understand you know him?”

Raven looked him straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know any bounty hunters.”

“I believe he also hunts,” Blake paused and a brief expression of distaste flickered across his handsome face, “mutants, among other things.”

Blake opened the portfolio he’d been carrying and pulled out a half-dozen pictures of Roan and herself taken over the last twenty-four hours – in the entrance to medbay, in the public passages, at the restaurant, and here in maintenance – and spread them across the table in front of her. Badly pixelated images of Roan and her, walking together arm in arm, talking with his head bent close to hers, both of them laughing as they leaned toward each other across a small bistro table, standing side-by-side in maintenance with their shoulders brushing as they looked at diagnostic results on a bank of screens…

All of the images had clearly been stripped from the station’s security cameras. She tried frantically to remember if there was a camera that would have recorded an image of their now all-to-public farewell kiss. She was also more than a little shocked to realize that station security had just opened their files to Arcadian Marines.

Blake cleared his throat gently, recalling her wandering attention. “According to several of your colleagues here, he goes by the name of Roan?”

“Oh. Roan.” Raven swallowed down a cold spike of adrenaline. “Sure. I know him.”

“Do you know what his cargo was?”

“No.”

“No idea at all?”

“I assumed it was a mutant, like usual.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“No. Not my business.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

“No.” She glanced thoughtfully at Blake, then added, “He did tell me that he had several potential buyers. Sounded like he was setting up some kind of bidding war. Driving up his profit. So he’s probably going lots of places.”

“No hints at all as to who his potential buyers were?”

Raven shrugged. “I assumed the same kind of rich Azgeda or Trikru assholes he usually sells to.”

Her sneer was genuine. She was prepared to accept that Roan took on dangerous work because it paid well, but that didn’t mean she had to like the kind of people who purchased his cargo.

Blake’s bright smile of amusement caught her off guard. Seemed he didn’t like rich Azgeda or Trikru assholes either. However, it didn’t stop him from asking another question. “Did he tell you how his ship was damaged?”

“Said he’d run into competitors for his cargo. And fought them off.”

“He ran into us.” Blake’s expression turned both cold and frustrated.

Raven couldn’t help herself, the words were out of her mouth before she could swallow them back. “Huh. Interesting. He got here first. With his cargo.”

Blake nodded, conceding the hit, and tried a new tack. “Do you have any idea where he is originally from?”

Raven thought of those blue eyes. The same deep, true blue that was hiding under the flaking paint of his expensive, personally shaped, proprietary armor. “No,” she said.

“Could he be former Azgedan military?”

Raven looked at him from under her brows. That was entirely too close to her own newfound suspicions. She tried for nonchalant. “I suppose. How could you tell?”

“Does he have body scarification? Along his back or shoulders?”

“What?” Raven was shocked by the idea. “No!”

“Are you sure?”

Raven smiled archly. If he’d questioned the other techs in Maintenance she had a damn fine notion of what they’d told him about her and Roan. “I’m very, very sure. The man is quite scar free.”

She kept right on smiling over the memory of the silky smooth skin of Roan’s torso, of slipping her fingers across the firm ridges of his abs, or down the fine hollow of his spine. Hairless and soft despite his deep space tan. Not at all like what really good-quality skin grafts would produce. Except sort of exactly like that.

“What is your relationship with him, precisely?” Blake asked.

“Precisely none of your business,” she shot back.

And no relationship at all anymore, she was sure of that now. Roan had kissed her goodbye. For the first and last time in the four years she’d known him. Then he’d left, with the prize of a lifetime locked in his cryotank.

“Ms. Reyes,” Blake tried on a full smile, and Raven had to acknowledge that it was a very good look on him, “perhaps we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“Have we?”

“Yes. We have. You know who we are?” His broad gesture took in himself and implied the members of his squad and ship.

“Of course. I recognize your uniform. Arcadian Marines.”

“We’re searching for Clarke Griffin. Our Cefodemorta.”

Raven’s jaw dropped in amazement, and she exchanged a wild glance with Sinclair who appeared to be equally shocked. “You’ve lost your Cefodemorta?” she gasped, “The Commander of Death? The hero of the last battle of Montovetero? The one who brought their capital city crashing down on their heads?”

“Yes. After the surrender, her convoy home was hit by the last renegade Montoveterian fleet. She escaped in a single-man pod.”

“I heard about that attack. You blew them all up. But,” Raven objected, “that battle was nowhere near here.”

“She fell into a transfer point. She could be anywhere.”

“So why look way out here?”

“She’s interested in mutants.”

“That seems like a really big stretch.”

“And an outer spiral would be a good place to hide.”

“Why would she be hiding?”

“She was instrumental in the creation of the alliance with the Trikru System Heda. And present at the end of it. There might still be some… ill feeling about all that. From many different quarters.”

Raven exchanged another quick shocked look with Sinclair. The news of a new Arcadian-Trikru System alliance had turned out to be the first salvo in Arcadia’s war against the Montoveterian Oligarchs. The Trikru had provided soldiers and ships for the first wave of assaults on Montoveterian space. Then, just as all was going well, the alliance went belly up in truly spectacular fashion, leaving the Arcadian forces stranded in what had looked like a truly hopeless situation.

That the Arcadians had turned it around – that their hero, their avatar, their Cefodemorta had turned it around – and that they had snatched overwhelming victory from near certain defeat, had stunned the galaxy.

That she was missing was privileged news by any measure.

“Look,” Raven glanced back at Blake. “I respect your dilemma. But obviously, I’ve never seen her in person.”

“But you do know Roan. The hunter.”

“Yes. But he’s not here now. I don’t expect him back any time soon,” or ever, her heart whispered. “I don’t know where he was going or what his cargo was.”

But now she suspected that Blake believed that the Cefodemorta herself was Roan’s prize. With her spirits sinking to her toes, Raven discovered she thought that Blake could be right.

“Worth more than all the rest of my hauls together,” Roan had said. He’d been hunting and selling mutants for years. Only something truly unique, like the Arcadian Cefodemorta, would be worth more than all of that combined. To the right buyer. Whom he seemed to think he could find.

“Okay,” Blake nodded as he pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. He offered her his hand. “Thank you for your time.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, not meaning a word, and shook his hand, inwardly mocking his firm, practiced grip. The man was a walking textbook illustration of an officer and gentleman. She didn’t trust people like that. Not one damn bit. Not even if they were in the midst of a heroic quest to save their Cefodemorta. Especially not then.

A man like that would do anything at all to save his avatar. Including eliminating Roan, who now appeared to be playing the role of a black hat in this latest chapter in the saga of the Arcadian Republic. Raven felt more than a little ill as she watched Blake stride off across the maintenance bay floor.

Sinclair wanted to send her home afterwards, but Raven insisted that she was fine to work. In truth, she wanted to do anything and everything in her power to get the Arcadian Fleet scout ship, and its earnest, handsome Captain Blake and his noble quest back into space and off her station as quickly as possible.

Roan had scored several direct hits on the power routers to their propulsion system, which is why they had limped in to Mecha Station so far behind him. She wanted to believe that it was deliberate, that Roan had only slowed them down when he could have blown them out of the black. She knew there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to let her gut do all the believing on its own. She believed anyway, even as she cursed him silently and only to herself as she wrangled damaged panels and pulled out melted conduits.

The repairs to Arcadian scout ship were completed less than ten hours later. Relieved rather than satisfied by a job well done, and exhausted after two all-night shifts back to back, Raven felt completely spent. She clocked herself out and headed for the lift to take her to her quarters and a hard-earned twenty-four hour rest period.

On her way out, she saw Sinclair settling in for what looked to be a long and tedious discussion as the Arcadian ship’s quartermaster began to haggle over the bill. She hoped Sinclair didn’t budge. Arcadia had plenty of assets now, and Raven and the rest of the techs here did damn fine work. She, and Mecha Station, were totally worth the expense, and she was usually very happy to sit down with Sinclair and help him fight for everything they were due.

But now she walked out with a cheerful wave and nothing but a smile on her lips and a song of retribution in her heart. Sinclair owed her for not giving her any warning about Blake.

The lift doors opened on the empty car when she was still a meter and a half or so away, so she made a dash for it, slipping in just before the doors closed. She only realized the car wasn’t empty after all when she felt the sharp sting against her neck.

Before the world went black, Captain Blake’s handsome face filled her vision, his dark eyes full of apology and his jaw firm with determination.

“I’m sorry Ms. Reyes,” he murmured, “But I need you to come with me.”

Chapter Text

Raven woke slowly and only after several tries. Her head was thick and her limbs were heavy, and each time she managed to work her eyelids up the comforting dark encouraged her to close them again.

This last time, however, there was lamplight glowing in one corner of the tiny compartment and she tried to turn away from it. Which was when she discovered that her arms and legs were immobilized. Her eyes flew open and stayed open, panic chasing away her lethargy.

She was strapped to a hospital gurney, wearing one of those back-open med robes. There was an IV drip hooked into the back of her left hand, and horror of horrors, a catheter tube snaking down her leg. Raven couldn’t remember anything since she walked out of Maintenance Sector, filled with relief that the Arcadian Fleet vessel would be leaving soon.

The Arcadian Fleet.

Captain Blake in the elevator with a needle in her neck and his stupidly pointless gesture of an apology.

Even knowing it was probably hopeless she started to struggle, flinging herself from side to side with what little play the cloth bindings afforded her. Her movement caused warm liquid to flow through the tube taped to her leg and she realized it was her own urine and she very nearly burst into sobs of humiliated fury.

Swallowing hard, she ordered herself to get a grip and start looking for a way out. After a few deep breaths, she decided the first step was to stop whatever drugs they were still flushing through her system. She was trying to curl her body up to tear out the IV with her teeth (regularly fucking a man with outstanding abs had encouraged her to work seriously on her own) when the door slid open, the lights came up, and Captain Blake himself walked in.

Recognizing temporary defeat over the IV, she sagged back into her pillow and spit out, “What the fuck do you want, jackhole? Besides my foot up your ass along with kidnapping and assault charges filed by my station?”

He quirked his generous lips into a brief smile. “You are a material witness to a prior kidnapping, and we have an extradition agreement with the Union of Independent Stations. It should take the lawyers years to sort it all out. In the meantime, welcome to the Arcadian Fleet, Ms. Reyes.”

Raven glared at him. His confidence was infuriating.

He dragged over a stool and maneuvered a small rolling table across her lap. Before taking his seat, he adjusted her gurney so that she was mostly sitting, propped up well enough to easily see the data pad he placed on the table in front of her.

The frozen image was of her and Roan, standing close together in her work area. It was the picture she’d been afraid of all along. Blake tapped the screen and Raven watched in real time as Roan stroked her cheek, tipped up her chin and kissed her, gently, softly, lingering for just a beat too long before pulling away enough to press another slightly too-long for a casual kiss to her forehead. She watched his lips move as he looked down into her face and supplied his words from memory, “Until next time, Raven.”

The short vid came to a halt, freezing just as Roan had turned away from her. To walk to the airlock that would lead him to his ship, and, she knew, out of her life for good.

“The Kiss,” as she’d come to think of it. Capital letters. Like the name of a vid or a novel or a poem.

“It seems your relationship with the hunter Roan is more significant than you acknowledged in our earlier conversation,” Blake said.

“What?” Raven raised her chin. “You already knew we hook up when he’s on the station. Kissing is a pretty normal part of that.”

“No,” he shook his head firmly. “Not this kind of kiss.”

Raven glared and didn’t speak.

“This,” he stroked the edge of tablet with one long finger, “this is genuine. He feels real tenderness for you, and you feel something for him.”

“So what? Fucking can include actually liking each other. Maybe you didn’t know that, Captain Blake?” Raven smiled as nastily as she could.

He merely smiled back. “I do know that,” he said. “But I also know that this is more. He cares for you. Quite a bit, I’d say. And, I think, you for him.”

“I already told you everything I know about his cargo. Which is goddamn nothing.”

“And I believe you. But I think you know a great deal about him, and I need you to tell us everything. We have to find him before he sells her to the highest bidder and you're my best source of intel.”

The expression in his eyes as he leaned towards her was disturbingly fierce. Raven recoiled as far as the gurney would let her. “I won’t.”

“You will.” He touched a button on his wrist comm. “Send in Dr. Tsing please.”

“Torture? Really?” Raven said, trying to calm the adrenaline already rushing towards her heart. “Isn’t that beneath you?”

“Yes. It is. It also doesn’t provide reliable results. But drug-enhanced interrogation does. And Dr. Tsing is quite good at it.”

* * * *

The next time she saw Captain Blake, Raven was wide-awake and sitting at a table in an interrogation room. Her ankles were secured to her chair and her wrists were handcuffed to a heavy ring inset into the metal surface of the table.

She’d lost track of the days she’d spent with Dr. Tsing, a tiny woman with long gently curling dark hair and a steely determination barely hidden by a fake smile and a never-ending stream of questions.

The drugs were painful and mind-numbing, a combination Raven had never expected. Setting her nerves buzzing like a shock lash set at it’s lowest intensity and at the same time wrapping her head and her tongue in heavy insulation. Because they’d refused to untie her hands, a face-masked nurse would come in at odd intervals to spoon feed her a tasteless goopy paste that dribbled down her chin to her chest and they’d leave it there for hours or days, the smell growing ever more nauseating until she’d come awake again to find herself in a clean garment and then it would start all over again.

No torture, her fine ass.

At some point she knew they’d docked with a larger ship, or possibly a station, and she’d been transferred, the ceiling lights flashing by as they rolled her gurney into another white medical compartment serving as a holding cell. Dr. Tsing came, too, along with her questions and her drugs and an unrelenting blur of pain and confusion.

Finally the day came when Raven woke up alone in a regular berth with a clear head. She was no longer secured to a gurney and a fresh change of clothes had been laid out for her, along with towels and toiletries for her to use in the shower in the attached privy. The outer door was locked.

After scrubbing every inch of her skin and washing her hair multiple times, trying to erase her knowledge of how often her body must have been handled by others, she examined the clothes they’d left and felt her fury return all over again. The sick bastards had actually replaced her undergarments with new ones exactly like the ones she’d been wearing when they kidnapped her. If they expected her to be grateful for their thoughtfulness they were welcome to think that through about a million times more and they’d still be wrong.

Another day passed and steely-eyed guards, a different pair each time, brought her meals. When yet another pair had arrived this morning to escort her to this room she’d almost – almost – been grateful for the distraction. They’d even allowed her to walk on her own, didn’t even bother to secure her wrists. At first she was hopeful they were just exceptionally careless and that she’d find a way to run. But they travelled all of six doors down a narrow hall, and then they’d secured her very firmly to this table. What felt like three hours ago, but was probably only fifteen minutes.

And then Blake walked in. It seemed he had come aboard this new place as well. He took the seat across from her and placed his omnipresent data-pad squarely in front of him.

Blake didn’t waste any time. “I'm sorry, Ms. Reyes, that we’ve had to resort to this method of intelligence gathering.”

“Fuck you.”

“But it was very useful, all the same.”

“Really? Because I could have told you that I know diddley-fucking-squat about Roan’s history, or background, or even where he went when he wasn’t on Mecha Station, and all without your damn drugs or your evil doctor bitch.”

“Yes. That’s true. But you know the man. And that’s what I wanted to learn.

“Was it worth it?”

“Yes.”

“So what did you learn? I assume you want to tell me or I’d still be staring at the wall in my cell.”

Blake conceded with a tilt of his head. “You’re right. I want to observe your reactions.”

“So, start. I don’t want to keep you from your busy torture schedule.”

The glance he shot her from under his eyelids was startlingly angry, but with a blink he wiped the anger away and began. “You admire and respect him, despite his current trade. You believe him to be, in his own way, honest and true to his word. He’s polite and extremely well mannered, something you find quite amusing in a man who hunts mutants at the edge of the galaxy. You know him to be widely read because he plays word games, and makes allusions to novels and vids and music. So much so that you actually took the trouble to broaden your own exposure to such things when he was away. You also know him to be disciplined about his physical training, and you believe him to be a formidable combatant as well as a man who is comfortable with lethal violence.”

This was all disconcertingly true. Raven shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. “So what if I do?”

“You've also come to believe that he could be Azgedan. That he's most likely a former soldier. You suspect that his Azgedan battle armor and his weapons and even his ship aren’t second-hand, but his own. You worry that he may even have once borne the scars that would have marked him as a member of the Azgedan Special Forces, and that he may have had them surgically removed and replaced with new skin grafts to disguise this. You believe that he had the knowledge and the skills to deliberately target our scout ship’s propulsion systems with a series of non-fatal but disabling shots. You believe this because he’s done the same in the past to other poachers who attempted to relieve him of his cargo.”

Blake paused to look at her but Raven didn’t have anything to add to this.

“You also, of course, spent a great deal of time providing Dr. Tsing with extremely detailed descriptions of his sexual prowess. It seems that your hunter, Ms. Reyes, is an adept and creative lover.”

Raven, to her horror, felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment. “And what the hell does my sex life have to do with your hunt for Arcadia’s Cefodemorta?”

Blake smiled at her again. “Maybe nothing,” and then his smile vanished and he was deadly serious when he added, “Or maybe everything. I believe your hunter is looking to strike a deal with his former employers. I think he’s taking her directly to Azgeda high command.”

“Why would he do that?”

“How much do you know about the Azgeda Special Forces?”

“Dick all.”

“You have to be born into the right families, attend the right academies, and graduate from a training course that sees ninety-nine of a hundred carefully screened aspirants fail. And once you’re in, you don’t quit. You leave in a casket or at retirement twenty-five years later. If you and I are right, your Roan is a most unique case. I think he was cashiered, but he was either too high-born to be executed, or he knew something and bartered for exile instead. I think he’s aiming to buy his way home with the political prize of the century.”

Raven stared in astonishment at Blake. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You got all that from my drug-addled babbling about role playing sexy pirate wench?”

“No. Or,” he grinned at her, “not entirely. We’ve been putting together quite the file on you as well.”

“Making good use of the Oligarchs data mining capabilities, are you?”

“Our data now, Ms. Reyes. And Arcadia built the equipment that monitors nearly every hub in the galaxy. We take nothing that wasn't already ours by right.”

Raven frowned.

Blake continued, “You possess, in the words of your mentor Sinclair, a ‘once in a generation’ mind. You're the youngest person in the last eighty years to graduate with top flight honors from the most demanding mechanical engineering program offered by the University of Montovetero, the oldest and most highly respected university in the central systems.”

“I did their distance-ed program, jackass.”

“You’ve been certified and licensed to work on the products of every major supplier of both ship and station components in the major systems.”

“So have half the techs on my station. It’s called Mecha for a reason, asshat. We run the best repair and salvage operation on our side of the central systems.”

“By the time they were twenty-one years old? I don’t think so. And you qualified for zero-G work ratings at eighteen, the youngest person to do so on your station in more than five decades.”

“Fifty-two years, to be exact. And yeah, I did.” And she’d been damn proud of it. It truly sucked that her accomplishment was thoroughly tainted now by association with Blake and his inquisitor bitch. “What’s your point?”

“That you are a brilliant and perceptive person, and if you have come to believe your hunter is a great deal more than he appears to be, then I trust your assessment.”

Raven couldn’t help it. She felt as though she had just sold Roan out to his greatest enemy, and all she’d ever done was like the smug bastard. It made her gut twist and her heart pinch. One day, when she had the chance, she vowed she was going to take a great deal of pleasure in kicking the shit out of Dr. Tsing.

She looked at Blake. “What happens to me now? You’ve got what you wanted. You could drop me off at the next hub station with a credit chip and I’ll head home and never see you again.”

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head in regret. “I see I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. You, Ms. Reyes, are my leverage.”

“How?”

“I’m certain that your mentor and I are not alone in admiring your many excellent qualities. I believe your hunter does as well. He’s been completely open with you about his tastes and his proclivities and his habits, and he has made no effort to disguise his knowledge of the galaxy or his skills and abilities from you. I believe he cares deeply about you. I believe he’ll make a deal to secure your safety.”

Raven stared at Blake, too shocked to speak.

“I think he’ll make a trade. You for his cargo,” Blake added, apparently thinking she needed simpler sentences to understand him.

Raven could only keep staring at him, so bewildered by this turn of events that her brain seemed to have actually flatlined.

“No witty comeback?” he asked, twisting his lips into a gently mocking half smile.

Raven shook her head sharply in a desperate attempt to reboot her mental capabilities. While she waited, she said the first thing that came to mind, “That’s never going to work. He dumped me. He’s not going to give up his prize for me.”

“I understand that’s what you firmly believe. I think you’re wrong, but even if you aren’t, I still think he'll do whatever it takes to keep you from harm.” He paused and looked her over carefully. “And I think you believe the same thing.”

“I know he’s going to be really fucking pissed that you hurt me because of him.”

“Yes. I expect he will.”

“And he’ll probably want payback.”

“I fully expect to spend my life looking over my shoulder until he takes it.”

“Your Cefodemorta is worth that much to you?

“Clarke. Her name is Clarke and she is my friend, and yes, she is worth that much to me. And your hunter is taking her to the one system in the galaxy that welcomed our remaining enemies. People who she and I argued passionately be allowed to leave rather than be killed outright, which was what so many of our own people wanted to do. So I will do whatever it takes to get her back safely. Risking the eventual wrath of a dishonorably cashiered soldier who has spent the last five years haunting the fringes of the galaxy catching animals for private zoos is really the least of my concerns.”

* * * *

After that, Raven was escorted back to what Blake was now euphemistically referring to as her ‘quarters.’ Quarters that locked as soon as she was on the inside, exactly like the jail cell it really was. During the next few hours her jailers delivered a stack of flimsy-printed novels and a child’s vid-viewer loaded up with a few dozen classic vids, along with several changes of clothes. Her meals continued to be served by a rotating cast of stoic and monosyllabic guards, always working in a team.

It was, she had to concede, a very nice jail cell.

The next morning her door whooshed open after a polite knock and Blake walked in, followed by two younger officers.

“I’d like you to meet Lieutenant John Murphy and Corporal Melinda Harper,” he nodded at each in turn. “I’ve assigned them responsibility for seeing to your needs while you are in our custody.”

“How sweet of you. Almost like you care.”

She also thought, but refused to say aloud because it was ridiculously self-aggrandizing and also stupid, ‘you really are worried that my ex-boyfriend is going to track you down and kick your ass, aren’t you, and you hope this helps.’

Murphy and Harper remained behind after Blake left, and the three of them stood there eyeing each other warily.

Like all the previous pairs of soldiers Raven had encountered in her cell, Murphy and Harper were young and lean and hard-eyed and looked to be surprisingly fit for jailers. So Raven was pretty sure they weren’t. Jailers, that was. None of them were.

She was developing a theory that Blake was running something close to a private operation with regard to her kidnapping and his crazy long-shot pursuit of Roan. She suspected that all the Arcadian personnel she’d seen so far were combat marines fresh from their victory over Montovetero and directly under Blake’s command. And she very much feared that as a consequence, she was being held in total secrecy. Which meant no one knew where she was, and no one was going to come help save her ass.

Harper finally broke the ice. “We’ve reserved some rec time for you each morning. We understand that you usually adhere to a physical training schedule and I’m sure you’d like to get back to it.”

Raven almost told her to twirl on her goddamned thumbs, but recalled at the last second that daily gym trips would offer her at least some opportunities for reconnaissance, and thanked her instead.

The reconnaissance angle was a bust. The lift was at the short end of the hall, they took it down two levels, and it opened directly into a small but well-equipped training area, with new machines in good repair, plenty of free weights and a heavy bag and pads for boxing or sparring. Raven stayed there as long as she could each day, even invited them to spar with her, longing for the opportunity to hit someone, anyone, but they shook their heads.

“Captain’s orders, ma’am.” Harper said.

And during every instant of every waking hour, Raven was plotting her escape. No fucking way she was going to sit around and wait to be traded off like some sort of damsel in fucking distress, one princess for another.

She was a genius mechanic. Sinclair told her so. Blake told her so. Everyone told her so. Not that she needed their reassurance, because she didn’t. She was fully alive to her own specific form of brilliance.

And because she was a brilliant mechanic who held factory-standard repair certifications from every major parts manufacturer in the galaxy, she already knew how to disable and open the door, pull off the ceiling and floor panels, and cut the power to the lights and the cameras that followed her every move. The problem wasn’t getting out of her cell. Or even hacking the lift controls. The problem was figuring out where in the fuck in the galaxy her cell was located, and how she might get from here to where she wanted to be.

Before she had a solution, or even much of a plan for how she might find a solution, Murphy and Harper arrived off schedule. Raven sat up with interest, because it was late afternoon, she’d already had her workout that morning, and supper wasn’t usually brought to her for another hour.

“You need to come with us now,” Harper said.

“Hey, strong and silent,” Raven said to Murphy as they headed out, “any hint on where you’re taking me?”

“You don’t have to be walking,” he replied, much to her surprise. He’d barely more than grunted at her for a week. “I’d be happier if you weren’t. I think you should be knocked out and transported in a floating coffin, just exactly the same way your boyfriend is transporting Clarke.”

Raven raised her brows. Something was definitely up, and it also appeared that Blake wasn’t the only one with an emotional stake in the fate of their Cefodemorta. But she only nodded. “Fair enough. But that still doesn’t tell me where you’re taking me.”

Neither of them answered. They didn’t have to. After three turnings into long narrow hallways that she’d never seen before, they passed through a solid double door guarded by a young marine and emerged into a huge open commons. It had a commercial food court along two sides, giant colorful mobiles twisting slowly in the vaulted ceiling, and a large water feature creating a pleasant whooshing sound right in the center. Raven realized that she’d been on a commercial hub station all along and nearly bit through her own lip in fury directed at her failure to seize the opportunities she'd already had.

A station. Not a ship. And it wasn’t even a military station, it was a civilian one. A huge public hub station in what had to be one of the central systems. This much unused space, with its shiny floors and with its metal walls covered with smooth façades, dramatic yet cheesy public art and free flowing water just evaporating right into the open air – none of which caught the attention of any of the hundreds of well-dressed people passing briskly through – could only exist side by side with great wealth.

She realized that this was also her best and probably only chance to make a run for it. All she needed was to catch the attention of station security and have them rush in while she slipped out in the ensuing muddle. She hoped.

Before she could think of any reason to delay, she started running right for the middle of the mostly unoccupied seating area that was massed in front of the food court. Murphy and Harper pounded after her as she dodged in and around the tables and chairs, tipping them over behind her as she ran. Then she felt as much as saw Harper cut out and around, taking advantage of the more open space to gain speed and cut her off. So Raven turned and headed right for the food stalls. She’d had to repair crap in the ones on Mecha often enough that she was sure she would be able to find her way through the tiny kitchens and to the stock area, and from there to the bowels of the station, a warren that would have plenty of places to hide.

Dashing past a startled samosa vender, she lunged for the staff door that would take her into the kitchens. The layout was surprisingly tight after the huge commons behind her, but she wound her way through the narrow passages and cooking zones, continuing to knock down anything stacked loosely behind her. She knew that would infuriate the vendors, but that was fine with her and they could take their bills right to Arcadian high command with her best wishes. She hoped they charged them for a week’s worth of loss at least.

She could hear Murphy’s thudding footfalls following close behind her and tried to push herself faster, but despite her recent gym time, her lungs were burning and her heart was thumping loudly in her ears. And she still couldn’t find anything that looked like a loading dock door. Which is when she spotted the refuse chute.

If it were built to galactic standards, it would take her but not Murphy, who was closing in on her much too fast. With one last rush of speed she jumped for the opening, caught her hands on the upper rim and with a grunt of effort, swung herself up, and hiked her legs over the bottom edge. With a quick prayer to the gods of engineering she’d never believed in, she closed her eyes, let go, and dropped.

The chute turned out to be quite short. Too short. She landed less than a second later in an unfortunately nearly empty refuse bin. Her feet hit hard, heels first, with a jar that went all the way up her spine and knocked her forward onto her hands and knees. So that the pulsar shot that ricocheted down behind her hit her square in the middle of her lower back.

She screamed. It hurt like a motherfucking bitch. It hurt more than anything she’d ever imagined. It hurt so much she thought her entire spine had been set on fire. When she ran out of air in her lungs to scream she started to cry. Rivers of hot tears rolled off her cheeks as she pulled herself to the wall of the bin and made a valiant effort to hoist her newly uncooperative legs up and over the edge.

She’d just raised her head above the rim when Lieutenant Murphy appeared, running toward her from the end of the hall, his cheeks red with fury.

“You fucking stupid bitch,” he snarled as he reached her. “I told you not to run.”

Raven wanted to tell him to piss off. To tell him he’d told her no such thing, but there was no time. He reached in and hauled her up and over by her armpits, paying no attention to the way he banged her shoulders and her elbows and her thighs and her knees as he pulled her roughly across the wide metal edge and dropped her to the ground. She raised herself up on her forearms, determined to drag herself away from him, when he caught her again, kicking her savagely in the gut. Then he reached down and picked her up, his grip painfully tight as he slung her up into a rescue carry, hanging her awkwardly head-down across his shoulders, his arm looped between her legs.

The position also stretched out her lower back, straining the entire area where she’d taken the pulsar blast and soon her vision went red with pain. All she could do was whimper when he started to jog.

After that she must have started fading in and out of consciousness, because the next thing she knew they were in the middle of a hanger bay, then they were in an airlock, and then they were inside what had to be another much larger Arcadian Fleet vessel, full of uniformed marines moving quickly and with fixed purpose. And then she was face down on a gurney in medbay, her neck twisted awkwardly to one side so she could see Dr. Tsing glaring down at her while talking to someone Raven couldn’t see.

“I am not a surgeon, nor a nerve expert and there is very little I can do besides alleviate the pain and hope for the best until she can be treated by the appropriate specialists,” said the bitch doctor, who seemed angry with Raven for her trouble.

The PA system blared to life on the heels of Dr. Tsing’s speech, a warning klaxon directing attention to the coming announcement.

“Your attention please,” came the smoothly-modulated female voice of every PA system Raven had ever heard. “Lockdown for decoupling begins in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now.”

Raven felt as much as heard the ship’s engines kick in. A low vibration, almost a humming, ran up the legs of the fixed bed she lay on and echoed through her bones.

The overhead lights flickered briefly as the ship broke free from the station’s electrical supply and switched onto its own power.

And then there was a very sharp, very horrible agony, a fucking huge needle driven into her ass followed by a thick, cool gel rolling heavily through her bloodstream, and then nothing at all.

Raven woke up, still in med bay, still on her stomach, though arranged much more comfortably. She’d also been changed into another fucking med-gown, had another fucking IV in her hand, and another fucking catheter tube snaking down her leg. The only good news was she wasn’t tied down, and someone had thoughtfully drawn the privacy curtains closed around her.

A few minutes later a medic she’d never seen before poked his head in. “You’re awake. I’ll let Dr. Tsing know.”

Before Raven could tell him please really not to bother, he vanished and Raven dozed off again. The rattle of the curtains being jerked aside disturbed her and her eyes flew open.

“Good afternoon,” said Dr. Tsing. “How are you feeling?”

“Numb. Pissed off.”

“Fair enough,” Dr. Tsing said. Her touch was cool and surprisingly gentle as she pulled aside the open flaps of the med-gown.

Raven hissed at the cold air settling across her naked ass.

“How does that feel?” Tsing asked.

“How does what feel?” Raven replied.

“I’m pressing directly on the injury site. Can you feel anything at all?”

Over the flutter of panic growing rapidly in her belly, Raven said, “No. Nothing.”

“Now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“Yes,” Raven almost sobbed in relief. Now she could feel Dr. Tsing’s cool fingers on her outer hip.

“There is definitely some nerve damage. Can you roll over?”

Raven could, though it was awkward as hell with all the tubes and the stupid flapping gown and her worrisomely numb, balky left leg.

“Can you sit up and swing your legs off the side?”

Again, Raven could, but it was hard work. Her left leg didn’t want to cooperate at all, and she ended up helping it along with her hands.

Dr. Tsing ran through all the standard reflex tests, and the terrible reality began to sink in for both of them. Raven’s right leg was fine. Her left was numb from her hip to her mid-calf, though her toes and the sole of her foot were as reactive as ever. She could stand up on her own, but she couldn’t walk. Her left knee buckled under her the moment it had to bear her full weight, and nothing she did made any difference. And when she did put any weight on it, pain lanced through her hip joint and up to her spine.

After glowering furiously for several moments once Raven was seated again, Dr. Tsing finally met Raven’s eyes. “You’re going to need more help than I have the ability to offer. In the meantime, however, we can discharge you from medbay.”

Someone had delivered Raven’s spare clothes from the station and another medic helped her dress. They discovered that with a long knee brace and a crutch, both in stock on a military vessel, she could drag her leg along. Very, very slowly.

By that point she was exhausted and weepy, so the medic brought a wheelchair and rolled her to the mess hall. Raven felt far more like herself after a meal and a trip to the restrooms, which she was able to manage fully on her own, thank you very much. Her dead leg sucked of course, but since she had no way to process the humiliating disaster and the devastating consequences of her escape attempt right now, she didn’t try.

She was hobbling back to her table when she saw that Corporal Harper was waiting for her.

“If you’re finished with your meal, the Captain would like to see you now,” Harper said.

Raven eyed the corporal suspiciously, feeling that the courtesy and the fact that she wasn’t being treated as an obvious threat represented some sort of trap. But Harper’s face was smooth and bland, and she stepped behind the wheelchair without comment or reaction.

The captain’s office was just off the bridge, and again they made no attempt to shield any of if from Raven. She would have worried that this signaled certain death, but there was no reason for her to even be alive if they wanted her dead at this point, so she decided to be curious instead.

Blake entered a few moments after she did, and at a quick gesture from him, Harper saw herself out, the door sliding firmly closed behind her.

Raven and Blake stared quietly at each other. Eventually he said, “I should have given Murphy explicit orders to tell you where you were being taken, and not to shoot. I’m very sorry.”

Raven met his eyes. “You should be.”

He nodded in acknowledgment. “I am.”

Satisfied, at least for the moment, that his regret was genuine, Raven said, “So where was I being taken?”

“You were being escorted to this ship. We’ve picked up your hunter’s trail and we are headed for Azgeda space now.”

“Can you even enter Azgeda space?”

Blake shrugged. “We have no orders telling us not to.”

“Do you have any orders at all for this mission?”

“What do you mean?”

“This,” she waved her hand, taking in everything that had happened to her in the last weeks, “all feels very improvised. Not to mention a violation of at least the spirit of the agreement between the UIS and Arcadia. Do you have any orders for this? Or are you entirely rogue right now?”

“I’m not ‘rogue.’ I’m,” he paused, “exercising initiative and creativity in pursuit of my assignment. Which is to find Clarke Griffin and bring her home.”

“Long leash they’ve got you on, then.”

“I earned it.” His gaze was hard and his jaw was fixed.

Raven changed the subject. “You still planning on trying for a trade? Now that I’m damaged goods?”

“I think he’ll be more anxious than ever to get you out of our hands, yes.”

“How did you find him?”

“We haven’t found him, exactly. But we have found a trail of smashed recon vessels. Two Azgedan and one Trikru. And they point us toward the heart of Azgeda.”

“How long until we catch up?”

“Less than two days, if all goes well.”

“In the meantime?”

“In the meantime, you’ve been assigned to temporary quarters. Digs for visiting VIPs. It’s the only empty room. Enjoy the amenities.”

She did. It was the nicest bed she’d slept on since this whole wretched adventure had begun. More than big enough for two, firm but nicely padded on top, with plenty of blankets and pillows, it was heaven. And she slept straight through until ship’s morning without any dreams.

The door chimes disturbed her during her morning coffee, for which the room had it’s own dispenser. VIP indeed. “Come in,” she called.

It was Blake. He strode quickly towards the large screen on the wall, grabbed for the control and flipped it on, searching rapidly through a number of screens before landing on the one he wanted. “Watch this,” he said.

It was a news report. According to the scrolling bar at the bottom of the image, the footage was from Tondisi, Polis. Capital city of the capital planet of the Trikru System. On a balcony overlooking a wide plaza filled with cheering crowds stood the Trikru Heda. Standing right beside her was the Cefodemorta of Arcadia, and behind them and nearly a head taller than either stood Raven’s latest ex. The crawler identified him as “Roan kom Nia, Heir Apparent of House Azgeda.”

Blake turned to her. “Looks like we’re headed for the Trikru system.”

Chapter Text

Raven took her seat in the officers’ wardroom, still reeling from the rapid pace of events. This was the second meeting she’d been invited to in the last six hours. She was not entirely certain when or how she became a member of Team Blake – the name she’d given the whole fucked up enterprise – or what she was expected to contribute.

As an apology for crippling her, if that’s what it was, it sucked big time.

Her very specific and personal knowledge of Roan kom Nia had obviously been completely overtaken by events. And of course, the big reveal that she had been unknowingly fucking the heir to House Azgeda off and on for the past four years had merely made her look, and feel, extremely foolish.

If he’d been handy, she would have taken her embarrassment out on him in the mother of all screaming rages.

But, she reminded herself as they waited for Blake to call the meeting to order, Roan wasn’t handy, was he?

Instead, it appeared that he and Clarke Griffin were being held under some sort of semi-formal palace arrest in Tondisi, neither criminals, nor enemy combatants. But neither were they free to leave.

The news media in Azgeda and in Arcadia both were having a field day trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Trikru media was reporting it as state visits, in honor of their Heda. No one believed Trikru media.

Here on the Arcadian frigate Casisto, the members of Team Blake weren’t worried about the why of it all. They were focused instead on coming up with a plan to get Roan and Griffin out of Tondisi and off Polis before either of their respective systems decided to plunge the galaxy into war to retrieve them. Or, though no one had the courage to say it aloud, avenge their deaths.

The morning meeting, which had begun less than an hour after Blake showed Raven the news vid, had dissolved into a babble of unanswerable questions and barely contained rage at the sight of their Cefodemorta standing side by side with the leader who had betrayed them in battle more than a year earlier, pulling her forces and leaving the Arcadians to die terribly at the hands of their enemy.

Since the officers on board the Casisto couldn’t go after Roan directly for taking their avatar to the Trikru, they yelled accusations in the form of questions at Raven instead. She took it as long as she could, but eventually yelled back that they could all go fuck themselves because she was just as clueless as they were.

Blake had watched in silence, a muscle ticking in his clenched jaw, until he’d finally dismissed everyone. Raven suspected that he really wanted to tell them to all take a time out, but he gave them each assignments instead. Her task had been to read through all the materials the Casisto’s intelligence officer had been collecting on Roan kom Nia.

Blake’s first order of business at this afternoon’s meeting, once he’d called them to order, turned out to be putting Raven on the spot. Again. “You’ve had a chance to look over the new file on your hunter. Do you think any of it is true? Or is it all bullshit, puff pieces to flatter the Queen, his mother?”

Raven blinked, then stuttered and cleared her throat, took a sip of water from the pouch in front of her, and finally managed to put together a semi-coherent reply. “I think a lot of it is obviously bullshit. All those palace-approved stories from when he was a kid about how great he was, serious, studious, charming, saving kittens and helping little old ladies … I mean, sure. I think he could totally be that boring do-gooder guy if he felt like it. But it would be an act. He’s a human being, not a hero from a teen romance vid.”

“Meaning?” Lieutenant Mbege, the Casisto’s very handsome executive officer, leaned back in his seat with an expression just barely on the right side of a sneer.

“Meaning, I don’t know!” Raven wailed in frustration. “I’m not some kind of psych expert, okay? But the guy I know is more stubborn and way, way more clever and creative than that crap makes him sound.” She gestured angrily at the pad in front of her. “He thinks really fast on his feet, he’s used to working alone without backup, and he never second-guesses himself. He kinda really gets off on the challenge of what he does, but he’d never want to admit that. He can be manipulative and tricky and sneaky. He has a mean streak and can be a sarcastic motherfucker when he thinks other people are being stupid.”

Which, if Raven were going to be completely honest, was actually quite often. Roan was a lot smarter than most. That was part of what had held her attention, right after his smirk – and his ass – attracted it. The flash of intelligence in his light eyes, paired with his sleepy grin, all full of promises in the dark. But, somehow, it felt disloyal to reveal that much to the people who were hunting him. Instead she added, “He can also be kind and generous and he’s nice to kids. And when he’s been drinking all night, he thinks fart jokes and dick puns are really super funny.”

“Okay, that’s actually good to know,” Blake said. Then he smiled briefly at her, and the expression in his dark eyes was startlingly warm and kind. “Well, maybe not the fart jokes and dick puns. I don’t think those will matter.” His smile faded and he looked around the table. “How about all the shiny military hero stuff? First in his class at the Academy, Special Forces, daring raids, fearless rescues, big-ass pile of medals and commendations? What do we think? Real or public relations?”

There was a heavy silence, and then everyone looked back at Raven. She shrugged again, raising her hands helplessly. “I have no idea? I’m a mechanic, not a soldier. I mean….” she didn’t know what she meant. She tried again, “Look, he’s been hunting and trapping and transporting dangerous animals for as long as I’ve known him. He’s got no shortage of guts or stamina. So, sure? It’s totally possible that he truly earned every medal listed in that file.”

Looking around at their doubtful faces, Raven entertained for the first time the idea that being heir to House Azgeda might, kind of, suck in some ways. No matter what he did as Roan kom Nia, the galaxy was clearly full of people who would believe only that his accomplishments were no more than a pack of lies.

And then it hit her. The thing that had been niggling at the back of her mind as she scrolled back and forth through all the news clippings and palace announcements and society gossip and informal pictures and formal portraits that made up the files she’d been given.

“The biggest difference,” she said, “between the guy in the file and the one I knew on Mecha Station? The guy I knew was happy.”

“This guy?” She tapped the data pad in front of her, frozen on an image of Roan just after he’d been inducted into the Special Forces. His dark hair was trimmed short in a classic military cut, he was clean-shaven and staring directly into the camera, his eyes almost impossibly blue. Every millimeter of his stance, so square and tall, radiated a furious discipline. The same discipline that had held him still and silent when brand after red-hot brand was set into his back when he completed Special Forces training. Just the images of that ceremony had made her cringe. “This guy was not.”

She looked up and around the table, only to discover that everyone was staring back at her. Their expressions had all taken on the predatory air of a pack of carnivorous scavengers. She re-played in her head what she’d just said, and then swore softly. “Shit. I’m back to hostage again, right?”

Blake lifted his shoulder in a vaguely apologetic shrug, but didn’t say anything. How could he? That’s what she’d always been.

“Sir?” said Lieutenant Murphy, waving two fingers, indicating he had something to add. Blake nodded. Murphy said, “He took out three military scout ships – two Azgeda, one Trikru – in the last two weeks, each one with a full compliment of troops. He left them completely dead in space, crews still alive in survival pods. That’s way harder to do than to just blow them up.”

Raven noted that he left out acknowledging that Roan had done something very similar to them, back when this whole slow-rolling catastrophe kicked off. The day Roan fled Mecha Station with their prize Cefodemorta stashed in his cryotank.

Murphy spread his hands, “I think his chops are pretty real. And he’s also working really hard not to start a war.”

“And we’re sure it was him?” Blake asked.

Murphy nodded. “Yes. The encounter reports each identify a ship that looks exactly like his, a bantam-class prowler, banged all the fuck up on the starboard side.”

“Mecha Station security suspects him of taking out about a half-dozen competitors in the mutant hunting business over the last three years,” Mbege offered. “No bodies have ever turned up, and neither have their ships. But they all vanished not far from known locations for his prowler.”

“What?” Raven exclaimed, “That’s not in the file you gave me!”

“It just came in, with the last data burst,” Blake said. “But you’d already confirmed that for us. Or, to be more accurate, you confirmed that you absolutely believe that he killed those people.”

Raven forced herself to lean back in her chair. Of course she had. She’d confirmed all of this. Spilled her guts in a week’s worth of interrogation at the hands of Dr. Lorelei Tsing. AKA evil bitch doctor who couldn’t even fix her damned leg and refused to give her more painkillers on the grounds that they were addictive.

“Oh, hello,” Murhpy said, looking at Raven with a raised brow. “Maybe you could have added the fact that he’s a known killer into your assessment of his being a soldier, Ms. Reyes?”

“He’s in a dangerous business,” Raven replied, keeping her voice even and cool. “There are plenty who prefer to jump the hunters after they’ve bagged their cargo, profit off their risks and their labor. Roan took issue with that. No one cared. It’s not like they wouldn’t pirate other ships and other cargos if there wasn’t a mutant to steal.”

“Nightbloods?” asked a Lieutenant Miller. “They hunt mutants, too, don’t they?”

“No!” Raven rolled her eyes. Surely Arcadian Marines didn’t fall for that shit? “Regular old poachers, or pirates, depending on the haul. Nightbloods are a myth, a story to frighten the kiddies into staying away from mutants so that the demon hunters don’t catch them by mistake.”

“Do you have any idea how Roan kom Nia came to be living and working at the ass-end of nowhere?” interrupted another one of the lieutenants, a woman named Cordero.

Raven tried not to bristle at that description of her home. It was accurate, after all, and something she usually took pride in. “I don’t,” she said. “Out at the ass end of nowhere,” okay, she might have put a little more spin on that than necessary, “it’s considered rude, not to mention dangerous as all hell, to ask people why they’re there.”

The only thing that made this answer less personally humiliating was that no one else knew either. The record was blank. Not even Arcadian military intelligence had a clue. But six years ago, something had happened. Whatever it was, it had ended in a terrible fight with his mother, the Queen. She had publicly thrown him out of her house and stripped him of his titles and his rank, though not, interestingly enough, his position as her heir. He had bowed, turned on his heel, and vanished from the palace and from Azgeda Territory. He’d been ‘missing’ ever since.

“Bottom line,” Blake said, “I think it’s clear that we can assume Roan kom Nia will play a very,” he paused, choosing his next word carefully, “proactive role in whatever we do. We need to plan with that in mind. I’d like your reports now.”

After that, Raven had very little to contribute to the meeting, which consisted of the Casisto’s officers brainstorming scenarios in half-coded military speak, full of acronyms and rough shorthand. She could have deciphered it if she wanted to, but she didn’t. Instead, she was replaying her memories of the last four years, again, trying to make sense of the man she thought she’d known in light of who he’d once been. And who he might be becoming once more.

A general rustling brought her attention back to the table. Blake was saying, “We’ll arrive in Polis orbit in eighteen hours. I’m in contact with Arcadian command and we’ve been delegated to represent Arcadian interests pending further developments. Get some rest, everyone.”

As they pushed back their chairs, Blake looked over at Raven, “Ms. Reyes? A word?”

Raven sank back into her seat, her heart plummeting. Once the rest of the staff had filed out, Blake came over to take the chair next to her. “You understand this alters our original plans.”

“Rips them up into tiny pieces and throws them into the incinerator, don’t you think?”

“It’s not quite that bad. You still have a valuable part to play.”

“Right. Now I’m a hostage instead of a trade.” She rolled her eyes. “Distinction without much difference there, buddy.”

“Yes.” He did look mildly ashamed. “But once knowledge of your existence becomes more widespread, you’ll also become a target. You are, in fact, more valuable than you were before, and, unfortunately for you, not just to me. I’m confident Roan kom Nia will do whatever he believes is necessary to ensure your safety and well-being. Others will reach the same conclusion. I imagine once word gets out about his life on Mecha Station, and it will if it hasn’t begun already, there are many who would take advantage of that if they could.”

“You thinking of selling me off to the highest bidder?”

“No!” He shook his head sharply. “You’re my responsibility. I took you off Mecha Station, and I fully intend to see that you get home again, safe and sound.”

Raven let the definition of ‘safe and sound’ thud to the table and lie there unmoving for a while. Let the mood get really unpleasant before she said, “So, you’re telling me that you, the guy who kidnapped me, had me tortured and interrogated, let his asswipe guard cripple me, and then helped to put a galaxy-wide target on my back, you’re my friend now?”

“Perhaps the only one you’ve got.”

“Fuck you Blake. Fuck you so goddamned hard.”

“I am truly very sorry, Ms. Reyes.”

* * * *

Five nerve-wracking hours after they arrived in orbit around Polis, the lengthy protocols for being recognized and granted permission to dock a shuttle at the military station and then take another shuttle to the planet surface were finally completed. Raven had paced in her quarters until her leg flamed out, pain shooting into the small of her back as she lay on her big comfortable bed and cried in self-pity until she finally slept again.

They were invited – or summoned as Lieutenant Cordero put it when she finally stopped by Raven’s quarters to bring her up to speed with events – to the palace for an afternoon audience with the Heda and her guests, Clark Griffin, Cefodemorta of Arcadia, and Roan kom Nia, heir to House Azgeda.

Then Cordero dropped her bomb. “The Captain requests that you accept our assistance in making a strong first impression, Ms. Reyes,” her glance raking Raven’s form and a not quite sneer appearing on her face.

Raven fisted her hands on her hips, the better to display her crumped coveralls, and raised her chin, so that Cordero could get a good look at her swollen, red-rimmed eyes and the creases from the bed linens on her face. “Are you saying I’m not looking my best right now, Lieutenant?”

“I’m saying you look like crap, Ms. Reyes.”

“Tell your captain to fuck himself.”

Raven wasn’t surprised when Blake arrived in person shortly afterwards to repeat his request.

Raven glared at him. “Tell me again, why you are taking me down there? Aren’t you showing your hand too soon?”

“If I could reasonably expect a quiet conversation with your hunter, then yes I would be. But I can’t. A visual statement is all we get.”

“So who am I in this scenario? You’re going to have to have some reason to be dragging around a gimp like me.”

He handed her a thick envelope. “Your credentials, ma’am. You are now an official representative of the Union of Independent Stations. You can thank your Chancellor Sydney when you get home. She moved very fast to get this to you in time. And it only just arrived.”

Speechless, Raven accepted the packet.

“You are here at the request of the Arcadian Republic. An invited independent observer to our meetings with the Trikru Heda, in recognition of the support the UIS offered Arcadia during the war.”

Raven looked up at him. “This very optimistic of you.”

He ducked his head and offered her one of his more charming smiles. “I’m an optimistic guy.”

Raven hadn’t been on a planet in nearly five years. Not since Sinclair and Finn traveled with her when she went in person to accept her diploma from the University of Montovetero.

The University had looked exactly like a University should, all imposing dark-gray granite buildings covered in stone lace, with soaring clock towers, squat squared-off bell towers, high vaulted ceilings with dark wooden beams in the library reading rooms, and mullioned windows in the faculty offices and classrooms. Mature trees and smooth green lawns and beds of flowers had surrounded the whole campus. Finn had kept saying that it was like a vid or a novel come to life.

Four years later, she knew from news reports, the old campus had been almost completely destroyed in the war. Any surviving faculty and students had been deported to work hard labor, turning hostile rocks into livable human worlds deep in the Azgeda system, with no chance of ever returning home.

This planetary trip was quite different. No grungy economy-class travel for her now. They docked at a military space station all decked out with a panoply of flags, and an honor guard, and an honest-to-god red carpet waiting for them as they exited the airlock. Their party was promptly escorted to a very shiny Trikru military shuttle for the quick trip to the planet surface.

Blake and the small detachment of his marines who were accompanying him fit right in. They were dressed to impress in their crisp navy fatigues and shiny combat boots, red scarves at their necks and their red berets perched just so on their heads. They carried no weapons. None were needed. They were lean and hard, still fresh from a terrible war and its even more brutal aftermath. It was obvious that they were their own best weapons.

Getting Raven ready to look like a serious diplomat had been more difficult. She’d tried to insist that it was completely appropriate for her to wear her regular tech coverall. That idea died a sad death when Lieutenant Cordero called up several formal pictures from the last meeting of the UIS. No one was wearing coveralls. They were all wearing various forms of business attire in somber colors, though some had accessorized with bright scarves or distinctive jewelry.

To Raven’s horror, it turned out the one person on the Casisto who was the right size and who actually had the elements of an acceptable outfit on board with them was Dr. Lorelei Tsing. For what it was worth, which was precisely fuck all because Blake had made up his mind that this was their play, Dr. Tsing was clearly as horrified as Raven was.

Raven was now dressed to impress in a simple two-piece black suit. It had a long jacket with sharply padded shoulders and wide lapels, worn over narrow trousers tucked into Raven’s own freshly polished combat boots. The same pair she’d been given when she woke up at the commercial hub. Raven and Dr. Tisng had both made it clear that this was the only acceptable footwear if she was expected to be able to walk on her own at all.

Corporal Harper had arrived armed with brushes and combs and a basket full of hair care products and now Raven’s long dark brown hair – about which she was prepared to admit she was quite vain – was pulled into a sweeping updo surrounded by a crown of small braids. At least Raven had been allowed – if that was the right word – to apply her own cosmetics. She went for the drama. The court of the living goddess of the Trikru seemed like the right occasion for it.

By the time she was finished, even Lieutenant - call me Roma - Cordero had said that she looked awesome.

“Damn straight I do,” Raven told her.

Tondisi was cold, colder than ship or station basic, so someone had donated a shiny crimson quilted wrap, along with a pair of slim black gloves.

From the waist up, Raven knew she looked really fucking fantastic. Under virtually any other set of circumstances, she’d be really looking forward to the expression on Roan’s face when he saw her in this getup.

From the shoulders down, of course, she was in a wheel chair, bulky leg brace clearly visible above her boots and over her trousers, and her banged up, second-hand military issue crutch was balanced in her lap.

So she really had no idea at all how he was going to react.

The shuttle set down inside the palace grounds after coming in along a huge, and hugely unnecessary, circular landing pattern. Aimed primarily at aweing the new people Raven was sure. She was also prepared to own that she was definitely a little awed herself.

Tondisi was a huge and lovely metropolis. It lay along a series of valleys linked by a river carving its way through a small mountain range that hugged a deep black ocean. The city had welled up from the river bottoms to splash up the sides of the hills, the tree-shaded houses eventually fading entirely into steep, tree-covered slopes.

The palace occupied most of the largest valley, and was really a small, walled city all to itself. In the center of the complex rose the Heda’s tall circular tower, an iconic image familiar the galaxy over. It was the tallest structure in the city, and, she believed, on the planet, by law of the goddess. And if that wasn’t enough, a huge eternal flame flared off a huge bowl rising above the tower’s flat roof.

It was… disconcerting to be seeing it with her own two eyes.

The interior of the Heda’s tower matched the exterior, all shiny marble and gilt trim. The elevator that took them to the throne room on the top floor was lined with panels inlaid with many different types of wood to form mosaic-like pictures of the valleys below.

The Heda’s large throne sat on a raised dais in front of the western windows, perfect for making sure that new visitors were at once brightly lit and completely blinded when they exited the elevator, while the Heda herself was guarded in shadow.

Once Raven’s eyes adjusted to the glare and she could take in the surroundings, it took a small act of will not to whistle in appreciation. The room was at least a double story high, with vaulted ceilings covered with shiny tiles. Several huge chandlers hung down, and were full of lit candles. Real, live, dripping and guttering in the breeze candles. That they were completely unnecessary in the late afternoon light was obviously entirely beside the point.

Another wide red carpet led to the center of the room before coming to an abrupt end at a low, heavily carved barrier. This close to the Heda and no closer was the clear message.

The Heda herself was a surprise. Raven had seen plenty of pictures of her over the years since her ascension to the godhead, of course. But those had not prepared her for the reality of the beautiful young woman seated on the large throne. Slim and regal, her clear, pale skin shone like porcelain in the reflected light of the sun. Her mass of shiny light brown hair was loose, flowing down her back under a net of tiny braids tied off with glittery stones. Her dark high-collared dress gave her dignity beyond her years and the naked sword in her lap reminded everyone that the Trikru goddess was a warrior goddess before all else.

Behind her stood two advisors, a pale pink bald man and a very dark skinned woman. Beneath their full robes, both of them heavily tattooed, ink tracks snaking down their arms and up their necks, coiling around their temples and swooping between their eyes.

Roan kom Nia and Clarke Griffin were standing quietly to the Heda’s left, a level below the throne itself. Not quite ‘with’ her, but definitely not with the representatives of the twelve clans of the Trikru either. They were all clustered to the Heda’s right.

Clarke Griffin, Cefodemorta of Arcadia, was also something of a surprise to Raven. She was much shorter than Raven had expected, the same height as Raven herself in fact. Her head barely topped Roan’s shoulder. Her face was also rounder than pictures suggested, making her seem somehow both younger and softer than Raven, and the rest of the galaxy, knew her to be.

Her long blond hair was woven into a thick, complex braid that hung forward over her left shoulder and her bright blue eyes were outlined in heavy kohl and dark shadow. She wore a long, gold gown, cut low to accentuate her frankly impressive cleavage and cinched tight around her small waist with a wide heavy belt. Her bare arms were covered in metal bracelets, delicate bangles on her wrists to large brass cuffs above her biceps.

Roan, once Raven finally allowed her gaze to pass over him, was nearly unrecognizable to her. Dressed in formal court attire, a elaborately-buckled, high-collared, fur-trimmed vest over a close-fitting long-sleeved shirt and tight trousers tucked into shiny low boots, he looked like a character from a children’s tale.

Her heart twisted with a quiet sort of aching regret as she let her glance swing back once more in a vain search for any sign of the Roan she’d known, the man who’d slouched through the thoroughfares of Mecha Station in a faded, mud-colored tee shirt, with his pilot’s jumpsuit tied carelessly around his waist, and low laced boots, scuffed and well-broken-in.

He met her eyes just once before sliding his gaze away almost immediately, his expression impassive throughout.

Raven had known that he would most likely react as though they were strangers. She had known he wasn’t going to rush across the room and sweep her into his arms and promise her that she was safe now and he would take care of everything. Half of their schemes depended on this fact. She had thought she was prepared.

She was not.

It cut her to the bone.

Their little group had come to a halt just outside the elevator doors, sorting themselves into formation. The corporal assigned to push her chair leaned over to set the brakes, murmuring, “Would you like assistance standing, ma’am?”

“No!” Raven replied, louder than necessary. Which had the irritating consequence of catching Blake’s attention. He stepped closer and offered Raven his arm, which she took after glaring at him. That her hip had frozen while she was seated and she probably would have stumbled if he hadn’t been helping her only pissed her off further.

Blake and his marines matched their pace to hers as they moved forward to be received by the Heda. That this added drama to their progress was probably good, but Raven found it excruciatingly embarrassing. She was also really fucking glad Blake had insisted on the borrowed outfit. Her tech coveralls would have made her feel even more awkward and out of place. She would have to thank the bitch doctor for her clothes. Which totally blew.

Halfway down the carpet, she allowed herself another quick glance at Roan and discovered that he’d crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. He was watching them carefully now, but she couldn’t read his mood.

After some lengthy formal introductions, the Heda nodded regally and it was Blake’s turn to speak.

“Commander,” he said, using the title the Goddess preferred, “I have been sent by my government to inquire after the status of Clarke Griffin, citizen of the Arcadian Republic.”

“Your Cefodemorta is our guest here in Tondisi,” the Heda replied, with a graceful wave of her arm that took in the city below. “We have offered her the opportunity to enter the trial by arms that will establish the strongest of the new members of our galactic coalition. In the name of her people, she has accepted. As has Roan kom Nia, Heir Apparent to the throne of Azgeda.”

Blake shot a wild glance at Griffin, who nodded gravely, her eyes locked with his. He swallowed visibly before turning his face back to the Heda. “Commander, I am confused. Clarke Griffin currently holds no rank or position within the government of the Republic of Arcadia. She has no power to act on its behalf or on behalf of our people.”

Griffin cut Blake off before he could get out anything further. “The captain is mistaken, Commander,” she declared. Her voice rang through the room, low and almost husky, and full of authority. She also turned to look directly at the Heda, but she pitched her voice so that it carried to the entire audience. “The people of Arcadia have granted me the title of Cefodemorta of their own free will, thus consenting to my elevation as their voice and their avatar. And in that role, I am pleased to step forward to contest for right of preeminence in the Galactic Coalition you are so graciously establishing.”

Blake looked completely stunned by this declaration, but pulled himself together enough to inquire, “Trial by arms? Contest for Preeminence? I’m afraid I don’t understand, Commander.”

“A melee, Captain Blake. Champions in our stadium. All against all as it was in the beginning, before the Goddess brought peace and prosperity to the first Commander and she carried it to the Trikru, and as we are now poised to bring to the rest of the galaxy.”

Blake glanced back and forth between the Heda and Griffin, obviously floundering in the face of this completely unanticipated development. Raven looked at Roan, who caught her eyes this time and nodded ever so slightly. This gibberish was, somehow, real. He and Clarke Griffin were apparently poised to fight in some sort of gladiatorial contest right out of the most dramatic fantasy vids.

Raven lurched forward a step, drawing attention to herself. “Commander, as the representative of the Union of Independent Stations and a neutral observer to this process, could you explain to me what this ‘melee’ will be? And how preeminence will be determined?”

The Heda’s glance fell directly on Raven. Her khol-rimmed eyes burned a brilliant green and Raven could swear that the Commander saw right through her every pretense and hope and lie that she told herself so she could get through each day, and forgave her for it. It was intimidating as all fuck to feel that with one glance the goddess learned everything there was to know about Raven Reyes, and at the same time to feel oddly grateful for her compassion and understanding.

“It is a fight to the death, of course,” the Commander said in her low, melodic voice. “The last warrior standing achieves the honor of first, followed in order of survival, down to the first to die thus taking the lowest place for their clan in the coalition.”

Raven was still too awed to respond to this, but Blake came back to life. “When will this melee take place, Commander?”

The Commander turned her eyes back toward Blake and Raven felt weak with relief. As though she had just survived some test she hadn’t known to prepare for.

“Tomorrow, Captain Blake. You have arrived just in time to witness the birth of the new galaxy.”

Chapter Text

Raven's rapidly-tiring hip and back were a throbbing halo around the line of eerie deadness that ran from her lower back and down her leg. She was reaching the limit of her ability to stand still and yet it seemed to her as though the diplomatic posturing would never end.

An elaborately-robed official formally invited the party from the Casisto back to watch the melee as special guests of the Commander.

Another official informed them that they were otherwise free to return to their ship for the night whenever they were ready.

The bald advisor, Titus was his name, thanked them – at great and unnecessary length – for coming to Tondisi at this momentous time.

And then they were finally dismissed.

Still unnerved by her encounter with the Commander and not wanting to reveal anything more to her than she already had, Raven waited to seek out Roan’s eyes again until they were gathering themselves to leave. She was somewhat pathetically hoping that he’d have figured out how to communicate via telepathy in the meantime. But he was leaning over Clarke Griffin, his hand at her back as they conferred with the Commander’s female advisor.

Exhaling sharply in frustration, Raven turned to Blake, hoping maybe he had some fresh idea of how to determine if their ploy was working. He was staring hard at Griffin, however, his eyes locked on Roan’s hand at her back. With a visible effort, he pulled his gaze away and looked immediately to Raven. With a tight twitch of his lips that just might have passed as an attempt at a smile, he gestured for her to precede him down the carpet and back to the elevator.

They were maybe halfway across the floor, Blake slowing his long stride to match Raven’s halting, lurching pace as she dragged her dead leg along the ground, every step sending another grinding wave of agony through the steady dull ache in her back and hip, when Griffin’s clear voice stopped them.

“Bellamy!”

Raven felt as much as watched Blake freeze. When she looked up at him she saw that his eyes had gone wide and seemed to her to be full of a terrible hope.

They turned back almost as one to see Griffin hurrying after them, her full skirts flaring out around her legs as she strode down the red carpet. When she saw they’d halted and were looking back at her, her worried frown dissolved into a smile of such relieved happiness it actually made Raven feel a bit like an accidental voyeur.

“Bellamy,” Griffin said again, this time on a breathy, tremulous sigh. By that point she’d reached them and Raven was fully expecting her to fall right into Blake’s waiting arms. Into Bellamy’s waiting arms.

She didn’t. Griffin came to an abrupt stop a handspan away from him, almost swaying from her sudden halt. “We’ve been released from attendance on Lexa for the rest of the evening,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder to include Roan in her ‘we’ and Raven realized that he’d been trailing right behind her. To Blake, Griffin said, “We’re hoping to join you?”

“Perhaps we could all gather in my rooms for a light supper before you return to your ship?” Roan said, his voice sinking deeper and deeper until it was more order than invitation. “I’m sure there is much news to be shared.”

This time, when he looked at Raven, he dropped a sharp glance directly to her brace and then up to her eyes again. This time, his telepathy worked just fine. He wanted to know what the hell had happened and he wanted to know whom to blame. And he wanted to know right this fucking instant.

“Yes, please do stay for supper,” Griffin said. Her expression was full of hope, and she seemed wholly oblivious to Roan glowering just behind her. “All of you,” and her warm smile took in the rest of the marines. “You have no idea how glad I am to see every one of you.”

Damned if Raven didn’t believe every word the woman said. Griffin was genuinely happy to them all, seemed to know them as individuals and not merely Arcadian Marines.

Then she turned her gaze on Raven, “And you, too, of course Ms. Reyes. I am very happy to make your acquaintance, and I’m so glad the Union of Independent Stations will have a witness here.”

There was something so intense in her eyes as she stared hard at Raven, something that she was trying to communicate that was so much more than mere pleasantries that it was straight-up alarming.

Raven was trying to decipher it, while murmuring that of course she’d be pleased to join them, when Blake overrode her.

“His quarters,” Blake said. The muscle was twitching in his jaw again and his throat was working as he swallowed back something that Raven guessed was a lot like bile.

“Yes, Bellamy. This is Roan kom Nia. He is,” Griffin exchanged a quick, impossible to interpret glance with Roan, “a friend.”

Roan offered Blake a regal nod, which Blake returned with a quick jerking motion, like someone had pulled a string in his spine.

“My quarters are several floors below the Commander’s. Clarke’s,” Roan paused delicately, “are not.”

The look that Griffin and Blake exchanged after that was so freighted that Raven thought it was a wonder they didn’t just spontaneously explode from all they clearly weren’t saying.

Raven coughed, trying to remind them to shake it off. Other people in the room were beginning to stare.

Blake immediately recalled himself and turned to Raven. “Ms. Reyes, would you be willing to stay in Tondisi a bit longer? I know you’re tired…”

“Please,” Roan said, “I hope you’ll join us, as well,” his eyes searching her face and his expression crushingly grim. “A UIS neutral observer is always a welcome presence, Ms. Reyes.”

The bow he offered her was deeper and more formal than the one he’d accorded Blake, but his hands remained at his sides.

Like Blake, Raven was too unnerved by the whole strange scene to know what kind of response to make. So she just nodded and told herself that tough girls did not burst into tears because their ex-boyfriends who happened to be future kings were so obviously infuriated to see them at fancy diplomatic gatherings.

“Corporal,” Roan said, his searching eyes alighting on the young woman who had been pushing Raven’s chair. When he continued, his voice had the ring of a man who had never doubted in his life that he’d be obeyed, “Would you please bring the UIS observer her chair? I believe that the long period of standing has tired her.”

Corporal Monroe glanced at Blake for his permission, but her feet were already moving. She was back in moments, and Raven was more grateful than she wanted anyone to know. Those nerves she could still feel in her lower back were on fire, and her bad leg wasn’t supporting any weight at all anymore. She’d been holding herself up on her crutch, her good leg, and willpower.

Then Roan was in front of her, reaching for her arms. She felt his familiar hands under her elbows, strong and sure, and a sob welled up in her throat. She forced it down.

“Allow me, Ms. Reyes,” he said, and his voice sounded closer to the one she knew from Mecha.

So she did. She sank into the chair, guided by his steady support, and she actually had to close her eyes against the wash of relief once the weight was off her legs and her back. She also realized how sore and tired her right shoulder, arm and hand had become. Before she could reach down to shift her left foot up onto the footrest, Roan had dropped to one knee in front of her and did it himself, his hands gentle and his lingering touch almost burning through to her ankle, despite the heavy fabric of her boot.

He looked up at her, and for the first time she saw a glimmer of the hunter she thought she’d known. “Better?” he asked, and his eyes showed nothing but genuine concern.

She nodded. Her throat was suddenly dry and her ‘thanks’ came out as more of whisper than a statement, but he accepted with a gracious shrug anyway.

“Is this a recent injury?” he asked, looking at her but indicating Blake with a quick cut of his eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “A misunderstanding that got out of hand.”

Roan looked up at Blake, who along with the rest of the marines was watching them with varying degrees of nervous concern.

“What sort of,” Roan said, his eyes cold and unspoken dark promises under every drawn-out syllable, “misunderstanding?”

“Mostly cleared up,” Raven answered, ridiculously pleased by Roan’s anger on her behalf. That at least showed she still mattered to him. Or possibly demonstrated that she was just light-headed from all the overwhelming activity. “And we’re all together now. You were offering food? I could definitely go for some food.” She could hear that she was babbling and stopped abruptly.

Roan rose gracefully to his feet. “Of course.” He took the handles of Raven’s chair, “This way.”

Roan’s quarters turned out to be a small suite several floors down from the main throne room. As soon as they were inside, Clarke hugged every single marine, greeting them all by name.

However genuine the hugs were, and they did seem to Raven to be entirely welcome given the way everyone was grinning in sick relief and heartily thumping each other’s backs, Raven half-suspected the whole exercise was designed to disguise the very long, very heartfelt hug she exchanged with Blake – with Bellamy Blake – last.

Roan had pushed Raven’s chair himself, preventing Corporal Monroe from taking over by the simple expedient of entirely ignoring her. Now he turned away from speaking with some sort of Trikru functionary who had appeared as they all arrived at his door and glanced at Raven. “Do you need anything? The bathroom is just over there,” he gestured at a door down a short hall, “if you need it.”

Raven started to thank him and decline, but the intense way he was staring at her made her change her mind. “Thank you,” she said and, with his help, got to her feet to make her way down the short hall. The rush of pain when she stood brought tears to her eyes, but it eased a bit as she moved.

The bathroom was generous, the kind that had a separate small room for every private function, but Raven didn’t have very long to take in the luxury. A quiet tap on another door, and Roan stepped in from what was obviously the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him.

Her brief fantasy of a touching reunion died a quick, painful death when the first words out of his mouth were an accusatory, “What are you doing here?”

“You heard the introductions.” She tossed her head and struck the best pose she could, leaning on the counter behind her for support. “I’m here representing the Union of Independent Stations.”

“Raven.” His voice cracked somewhere between an order and a plea, and his eyes burned hot and a little desperate for the first time since she’d entered the throne room an hour or so earlier.

She crumbled. She’d also been waiting for nearly a month for the chance to tell him. Which meant her voice came out somewhere between rage and despair when she wailed quietly, “I got my ass dragged into Blake’s business, chasing his fucking Cefodemorta.”

Roan nodded, her words confirming whatever he’d already suspected. “Because of me.”

“Yep,” she agreed, popping the ‘p’ hard and tasting all her sour bitterness about everything on her tongue. “Because of you.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d thought any of this would happen….” he trailed off, sliding his gaze away from her angry glare.

Raven shrugged with a carelessness she most definitely did not feel. “I don’t know what you could have done to prevent it. They showed up about eight hours after you left. I think Blake already suspected you were from Azgeda, and that you had the Cefodemorta in your cryotank. Did you, by the way?”

“Yes.”

Raven nodded, trying not to betray just how repugnant she now realized this was. Better late than never, she figured, to recognize just how morally compromised Roan’s chosen avocation-in-exile was. “Blake thought you might be willing to make a trade, me for Griffin. I tried to tell him there was no way an ex-boyfriend was going to go for that kind of deal for me, but he didn’t listen.”

Roan blinked, and an uncomfortable silence fell.

Then, of all reactions Raven never expected, his whole face lit up with a slow, brilliant smile. “Did you just promote me to boyfriend, and then drop me in the same breath?”

“No!” Raven snapped, cringing at his smug amusement at her expense. “You dropped me, asshat. You kissed me goodbye. I knew you were never coming back.”

He actually opened his mouth, and then closed it while he rethought whatever he’d been about to say. After carefully searching her face, he tried again. “I kissed you goodbye and said ‘until next time.’ Which is exactly what I meant. And for the record, I’m still planning to come back.”

The silence that fell was so dense that Raven could actually her hear own pulse thudding in her ears. Eventually she said, “Oh.”

The she swallowed hard, trying to force her wildly beating heart to get out of her throat and back down into her chest where it belonged.

Without obviously moving, Roan was now so close to her that she could have reached out to touch him. She gripped the edge of the counter and her crutch instead.

He leaned closer, resting his fists against the counter on either side of her, blocking any possible avenue of escape. Not that she wanted to go anywhere. Not now.

With his face only inches from hers, he said, “If I ever do need to walk out of your life, I will tell you in plain language. I will not vanish and then send you a soppy letter explaining how badly I feel about it a half-a-year later.”

Raven blinked, surprise stealing her breath away. She’d always really hoped Roan had forgotten what a pathetic mess she’d been that night. He’d arrived on the station to find her in a bar, some eight or nine months after their first casual hookup, sobbing drunkenly over Finn Collins’s first, and last, letter, a long sad recounting of how terribly he felt that he’d had to leave Mecha without saying goodbye. She’d never expected to be so glad that Roan had remembered instead.

“Also,” Roan paused, making sure he had her full attention before he continued, “I would have made the trade.”

Raven couldn’t have looked away from his eyes even if she’d wanted to. This ended one of two ways, she realized. She kissed him. Then they fucked right here and right now in the bathroom and literally screwed their chances of getting everyone out alive. Or they slammed on the brakes right this instant.

And, it totally sucked, but, also too, her back was fucking killing her and there wasn’t a comfortable surface in sight.

Brakes it was.

“Don’t you dare make me cry,” she said, and her voice shook only a little, and only at first. “It took me three tries to get my eye liner right and I didn’t bring anything to repair it.”

He must have known what she was doing, but he only smiled and immediately stepped back, giving her space she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted after all. Then he sobered. “When this is over,” he said, “we need to talk about a lot of things. For now though, you have work to do.”

Raven sniffled and swallowed, trying to suck back the overwrought tears she hadn’t let fall. “Excuse me?”

“We’re talking in the bathroom because I think, think,” he stressed, and handed her a box of tissues, “that there are no electronics in here. The Trikru have pretty intense body privacy norms and bathroom spying would violate all of them. Also, consent is bizarrely central to their entire project. You have to agree to take the chips. Until then, your individuality is respected. Otherwise, this whole building, and most of this valley, are nothing but a huge electronic net hooked directly into the Heda’s AI. Everything is under her observation through the eyes and ears of her chipped subjects.”

“So, that means we can’t…”

“Right. But electronics require power. Can you shut down the power to this suite?”

“Yeah, of course. But won’t they know immediately?”

“Yes. But she already knows we’re going to be scheming. That’s not the part we have to keep secret.”

“But,” Raven frowned, “won’t there be freestanding devices?”

“Yes. Which means blocking wireless signals too.”

Raven wrinkled her brow in incredulity and spread her obviously tool-free hands, waggling her empty fingers for emphasis. “Ask much?”

“Not more than you can do.”

His confidence was bracingly aggravating. “Do you have anything for me to work with?”

“In the bedroom there is a really high-end entertainment suite – flat screen, 3D, and VR. All the accessories.”

Raven frowned, and then grinned, ideas already expanding and evolving right behind her eyes. “I’ll meet you outside in …” her grin faded a bit, “not five minutes. I’m pretty slow moving right now. Ten.”

His looked down at her brace, frowning again. “You’re going to tell me what happened.”

“Yes. But not tonight.”

“Can the damage be repaired?” his question was surprisingly tentative.

“The doctor says yes, just not on a military frigate. I’ll have to go to specialists.”

“Okay.” His relief was palpable. “We’ll deal with that.” He nodded a few times, and then vanished back into the bedroom, the door closing with a quiet click.

After everyone had finished eating an elegantly prepared and presented meal, and the servers had finally, finally left, Roan pushed his chair back from the table and said, “Ms. Reyes? If you would, please?”

Raven pulled out the EMP device she’d constructed while ‘resting’ in Roan’s bedroom before the food arrived and depressed the button. The lights throughout the suite went out, leaving it lit only by dozens of burning candles. The lights of the city below that illuminated the sky were reflected back through the open windows, adding their small glow to the room.

“Which wire?” Roan asked. He was headed for the main junction box hidden in the front closet.

“Any of them, then all of them,” Raven replied.

He nodded, stuck a dinner knife behind the protective cover plate and ripped it free, then yanked out all of the wires.

“How long do we have?” he asked as he strode back to the dining area where Blake and the rest of the Arcadians had risen to their feet, all of them wearing various expressions of shock.

“Worst case? Five minutes or less, best case thirty minutes. Plan on ten?”

“What the hell…” Blake started to say, but he never finished the sentence.

Roan walked straight up to him, drew back his arm and landed a wicked right hook square on Blake’s jaw, which rocked his head back and spun him to his knees.

Griffin cried, “Roan? What the fuck?”

The rest of the marines reached for the side arms they weren’t wearing.

Blake coughed, worked his jaw and waved off his soldiers. “Hold!”

He raised his eyes to Roan, and they exchanged a long measuring look and then short nods.

Then Blake turned his head to Griffin, “I earned that. I kidnapped Ms. Reyes, and I’m responsible for her injuries.”

Griffin just gaped at them all.

“One minute down and counting,” Raven said, trying not to enjoy the scene and utterly failing.

On general principles, she naturally rejected the notion of someone else fighting her battles for her. Given her current circumstances, she was pleased to make this one enormous exception.

“I’m guessing you have some half-baked rescue schemes,” Roan said, extending a hand to pull Blake to his feet. “Let’s hear them.”

Roan quickly dismissed the first three as unworkable or impractical given conditions on the ground, but he liked the fourth. Because he spoke the same military jargon as the Arcadian Marines, they came to a remarkably swift meeting of the minds.

Well, everyone’s mind but Clarke Griffin’s. She was still protesting when they hit the fifteen-minute mark.

“I can still get through to Lexa! You have to give me one more chance!”

“You’ve had ten days and haven’t made a dent, Clarke,” Roan snapped, obviously at the end of his patience over an ongoing argument. “You have to accept that the woman you once knew and loved as Lexa is gone. She’s been completely subsumed into the Commander AI, and it doesn’t matter how much that succubus wearing her body claims to remember or to love you. She doesn’t and she can’t.”

“Lexa is still in there! I know she is!”

Raven thought Griffin actually looked like she might be near tears, though in the flickering candlelight it might have only been a trick of the shadows.

“Bellamy,” Griffin turned and implored Blake, “Please!”

Blake shook his head, his mouth a hard thin line. “The Commander is putting you in an arena, tomorrow, armed with a sword that you don’t know how to use and expecting you to fight to the death against fifteen other champions. No. No more chances.”

Griffin was definitely crying now, delicate tears tracing down her cheeks.

The emergency lights in the corners of the room and over the doorways came on, but the frozen tableau didn’t change. Griffin was sitting at the table with her face wet from silent weeping, her elaborate eye make up staining her cheeks. Blake looked like he was carved from granite, the rest of the marines appeared to be both horrified and furious, and Roan… Roan was on his feet beside Griffin, his hands balanced on the table and looming over her shoulder.

“Or just go ahead and agree to take the chip,” Roan practically hissed, taunting and contemptuous all at once. “It’s what’s Lexa’s always wanted you to do, and you know she’s fully prepared to use any means, fair or foul, to pressure you to do just that.”

Griffin located her spine and shot to her feet, nearly chest to chest now with Roan as she spat, “How dare you! I broke the alliance rather than link Arcadia to the Commander’s hive brain. I chose death for my people over that, because there are fates worse than dying. I’m not going back on my decision now!”

Roan didn’t flinch. “Then. Let. Lexa. Go.”

* * * *

“Just to be completely clear, we’re heading straight into a trap, right?” Raven said, looking over to Blake as they boarded the Casisto’s shuttle for the trip to Tondisi. The melee was to begin in three hours, assuming they didn’t stop it in time.

“Right,” Blake said, following her into the shuttle. “Trap.”

“So, why is it you’ve decided at the last minute to come with me to retrieve Roan’s ship?” Raven asked as she settled into a seat, sliding her crutch under her feet and kicking it out of the way as she reached for the safety harness. “Shouldn’t you assign another one of your officers to do this?”

Blake dropped into the seat across from her. “If it helps, all my officers agree with you,” he said, expressing absolutely no concern about this.

“Thank you, sir!” exclaimed Lieutenant Murphy, snapping his own harness closed after taking the seat next to Blake. “Yes! We do agree! Mbege could handle this. Or Miller.”

Blake, looking a little tired of repeating himself, said, “No.”

“Yes!” Raven shook a scolding finger at him. “You should be with the teams that are going to hit the convoy taking them to the stadium. That’s where Clarke Griffin is.” Raven was very self-conscious about holding back ‘and Roan,’ feeling that this would not be persuasive. The large bruise on Blake’s jaw from Roan’s punch was a brilliant purple today. “You know you want to be with her!”

Blake shook his head. “No. If an entire Marine platoon and Roan kom Nia can’t get Clarke out, my being there too wouldn’t make any difference. But staying with you, I know I can improve the odds of getting kom Nia’s prowler in the air.”

“Big talk!” Raven exclaimed with a sneer, but feeling strangely pleased anyway. Either because of his implied confidence in Roan no-longer-completely-full-of-lies kom Nia, or because it was nicer than she was prepared to admit that he was the one in command of her team.

He sent an impressive side-eye her way, but otherwise ignored her interruption. “Plus, I’m responsible for dragging you into this situation. I’ll see to it personally that you make it out.”

Raven started to giggle, even though she knew it was hugely inappropriate. He was just so boyishly determined to do the right thing now, long after it mattered. “My hero!” she trilled, clasping her hands under her chin and batting her eyes dramatically.

Compressing his lips in disapproval at her theatrics, Blake said, “Since you won’t stay behind, I have go with you.”

Raven tossed her ponytail and leaned back into her seat. She would have snapped her gum if she had any. “I’m a non-negotiable element. You need me.”

“Because your boyfriend wouldn’t give anyone else the keys to his ship!” Murphy pointed out, clearly still a little bent about this.

Raven raised her chin. “I’ve rebuilt it at least twice, one way or another, and added improvements of my own. No one knows that prowler better than me, not even him. I may not be rated to fly every ship ever, or even most. But this particular ship? I’m better than anyone else you’ve got. ”

“I know.” Blake shrugged and opened his hands, refusing to argue the point any longer. “So it’s my job to make sure you get on it.”

“Woop! Woop!” Raven hooted, then out of the corner of her eye caught Murphy’s irritated expression, so she raised her fists in the air and crowed, “Go Team Blake!”

“Are you stoned right now?” Murphy asked, staring at her with a combination of dawning understanding and complete incredulity written in his eyes.

“A little,” she agreed, dropping her hands and turning to look at him with a friendly grin, her head lolling ever so slightly as she did. She tried to correct, holding herself stiller and explaining, “Whatever the good captain pried out of Dr. Demon Bitch is pretty sweet shit. I haven’t felt this good since you shot me in the back, you motherfucking asswipe.”

Murphy ignored her insult. “Are you even going to be able to sit up?”

“I’m sitting up now!” Raven pointed out. “And Captain Handsome here has three adrenaline shots, for when the action starts.”

Blake looked at Murphy. “Dr. Tsing said this phase,” he jerked his head at Raven, “wouldn’t last long. Twenty minutes tops. She should be mostly sober, and pain free for the next ten hours.”

Raven smiled smugly at Murphy. He just shook his head at her, clearly done with her attitude.

“Let’s review one more time,” Blake said. “Murphy? Phase one?”

“Yes sir,” said Murphy, clearing his throat and sitting up straighter. “Over the last ten hours First and Second platoons have dropped down to the surface, travelling in twelve-member squads. We have confirmation that they are embedded in their assigned positions and nothing suggests they’ve been spotted. As of right now, we’re good to go.”

Raven interrupted, shaking her head, “I still can’t believe that! How can no one notice a hundred soldiers dropping down from the sky in strange shuttles?”

“People are amazingly oblivious when they believe something is impossible, even unthinkable,” Blake said. “Tondisi has never been attacked by an extra-planetary force ever in its thousand-year history. So even if they do see something that should tip them off, they’ll disregard it. It’s not a thing that’s possible, after all.”

“How can you be so sure?” she demanded.

“It’s how we beat Montovetero, in the end,” Blake replied. “They thought it was impossible, too, so they didn’t notice it when it started and by the time they realized what was happening, they were too late to stop it.”

“And your guys are sneaky enough to hide in plain sight like that?”

“Yes,” Blake said. “We are. A trick we learned from the Azgeda Special Forces, actually. How to seem like regular people in a crowd, even when we’re there to destroy them.”

Raven thought about Roan, in his regular pilot jumpsuit, sitting with the regular folks in the regular people bar, tossing back regular beers and flirting with her, a regular girl… and realized that she hadn't missed anything that would have told her who he 'really' was. He fit in because he was trained to fit in, and because like most things he did, he was really good at it.

She looked back at Blake and his team. “You did that, didn’t you? Slipped in unnoticed and then destroyed them. Over and over. During and after the war.”

The war for Montovetero had been hard and dramatic enough, Raven knew, but 'clearing' the planet – rounding up and deporting the entire remaining population – had been a brutally ugly business.

“You marines,” she said, swiveling her head to look at all three of them, Blake, Murphy and Roma Cordero, the third member of the team who was sitting next to Raven. “You were assigned the task of digging out the last of the Montoveterians, weren’t you?”

Blake nodded, his dark eyes measuring her as he spoke. “Yes. We were. Many, maybe most, of the survivors of the war were willing to put down their weapons, surrender and leave without further struggle. Others dug in, holing up in cities or remote rural outposts, armed to the teeth and willing to fight to the last person standing. It was our job to get them out, and without just dropping bombs on them. We got very, very good at it. Our priority was always to slip in to get to the kids first. If we could control them, the adults were more willing to come along.”

“And if you couldn’t?”

“Then we had to take the position by force.”

Raven shuddered, her drug-stimulated imagination offering up vivid images of the carnage he was implying. “They must hate you now.”

“With the passion of a thousand suns,” Murphy agreed, clearly not giving a damn about their pain. “Or about half as much as we hate them. Did you know that they impounded food and water and medical shipments to Arcadia for nearly a generation? Impounded what we had bought with our own damn money from selling products we made in our own factories, from raw minerals we wrenched from the ground ourselves, all in order to force us to pay them higher tariffs? Tightening their stranglehold year after year, doling out supplies only in exchange for further concessions? That we had to enforce population controls to keep from outstripping our shrinking resources, encouraging our elders to commit suicide when they could no longer work, punishing anyone who had more than one kid? The whole time everyone had to work harder than ever, just to keep production to the same levels? That we had to crash our own population just to have a few survive?”

“There's plenty of hate to go around,” said Blake, cutting him off. “But I assure you, Ms. Reyes, infiltrating an open city that doesn’t even know to be afraid? It’s not a problem.” He turned to Roma Cordero. “Continue please, Lieutenant. Phase two.”

Cordero’s voice was clear and steady, and Raven was positive it held rebuke for her interruptions. She resolved to listen without further commentary.

“Our objective is the soft target convoy carrying Clarke and Roan kom Nia from the Tower to the stadium for the big fight,” said Cordero. “We have an advantage in the long narrow shape of the city. There are five natural choke points, where all of the major east-west roads join up to go through the same small passes between the valleys. Less ideal, but workable, are the ten major bridges that crisscross the river and carry ninety percent of the crosstown land transport. Once the hostages are confirmed present in the convoy and their vehicles identified, we hit at the next choke point, whichever one it is.”

Blake nodded, and picked up the next element himself. “Phase three begins while Clarke and kom Nia are being rescued by First Platoon. Ms. Reyes, escorted by the three of us, will retrieve kom Nia’s prowler. It’s parked at a landing field just outside the northern boundary of the city. We spring the trap, steal the ship, and get off the ground.”

Blake turned his gaze to Raven. “Ms. Reyes? Your portion?”

Raven nodded. “Phase four. On our way to rendezvous with the Casisto, we make a dramatic flyby of the Heda’s Tower and then the rest of the city, making it look like we’re planning a touchdown near the stadium to pick up your Cefodemorta, drawing eyes and fire away from the actual ships that will be carrying her and Roan and the marines back to the Casisto. Then we run like hell ourselves.”

Blake nodded, and checked his watch. “Good. We dock at the space station for transfer to a Trikru shuttle in ten minutes.”

In the silence that fell inside the Casisto’s shuttle, Raven tipped her head back and closed her eyes. This would be her last chance to review everything about the prowler’s capacities before their rescue operation went live.

Chapter Text

“Ms. Reyes. Ms. Reyes! Raven!”

Blake’s hand was on her shoulder and he was shaking her vigorously.

“What!” She struggled to sit up, shaking her head to clear away the grogginess of an unexpectedly deep nap. “Are we on the station?”

“You slept through the transfer. We’ll be on the ground in a few more minutes. Ready for an adrenaline boost?”

Jolted fully awake, Raven looked around wildly, searching for some point of reference, something to orient herself by, when she caught sight of the sky outside the windows. It was blue, not black, with faint puffs of white clouds blowing along the edge of the distant dark green sea, not bright stars glittering white and blue and gold and pink.

They were wheeling in over Tondisi in a commercial shuttle, hired for the occasion by the Heda to ferry the party from the Casisto between the military space station and the ground. All the available military shuttles had been reserved for Trikru dignitaries. Blake and the rest had half-wondered if was a trap, had some plans if it was. Apparently it wasn’t.

Raven was in the window seat, Blake next to her on the aisle. They were about seven or eight rows back from the front of the little vessel, where the outer door and the pilot cabin were located. There were three or four more rows of empty seats behind them.

“How did I get here?” she muttered to Blake, scrubbing at her face in at attempt to speed up blood flow and clear her head faster.

“I carried you, how do you think?” he said, and then tilting his head closer and with his voice pitched lower still for her ears alone, he added, “Go in two minutes.”

She nodded, their plan coming into focus with an abrupt jerk, natural adrenaline surging through her veins. “I think you can hold off on that boost for now. My heart just started pumping plenty hard.”

“Pain?” he asked.

Raven focused on her hip and then her back, and then she grinned in delighted relief. “No! None at all right now!”

He nodded and turned away from her, ostensibly leaning to look out the window across the aisle, actually catching Murphy’s eye. Murphy was seated one row behind them and on the other side of the shuttle.

Raven wondered if everyone had a desperate last minute need to pee before they went into action.

Murphy rose, stepped into the aisle and stretched.

The uniformed steward hastily rose from his backward facing jump seat at the front and stepped towards Murphy, beginning to protest. “Sir, I have to ask you to clear the aisle for landing….”

Cordero, seated in the front row, stood up as soon as the lone steward passed her by, grabbed him from behind and slapped an ampule against his neck, catching him as he fell. He would sleep for the next twelve hours.

With the steward strapped into an empty seat in the front row, Murphy and Cordero headed for the pilot’s cabin. It was sealed against simple assault, but without counting on experienced, determined Acadian Marines, soldiers who had taken out far more sophisticated barriers than an electronically locked door.

Thirty seconds later, they had the door off its hinges and stashed against the wall, they’d secured pilot and co-pilot and they were sleeping soundly next to their steward.

Raven had scooted into the aisle seat to watch, and she could see Blake already at the controls while Cordero dropped into the co-pilot chair. Murphy, meanwhile, had taken the steward’s jump seat and pulled out a multi-channel communicator. This was tied directly to a military satellite, one launched by the Casisto the same time their team left the Arcadian frigate for the ground.

“Team one, report,” Murphy said.

“Team one in place,” came the immediate reply. “Your weapons are ready, sir. Happy to see you’re right on schedule.”

Blake hadn’t altered course. He settled the shuttle right into its assigned landing spot at a small private station on the southeastern side of the city, not far from the big coliseum that was the site of today’s melee. Leaving Cordero at the controls, Blake helped Murphy swing open the outer door.

Raven leaned over the seat next to her to peer out the window to her right, watching as the waiting ground vehicle drove close. She recognized the Arcadian Marine who was at the wheel. He had accompanied them to the Heda’s Tower the day before, and so had his assistant. Team one, right in place, right on time. They had secured the station as soon as the shuttle took off to collect Blake and the rest of them, stashing the staff and the drivers somewhere out of sight.

Together the two marines helped Murphy wrestle the three sleeping crewmen out to the ground car and bundle them into its back seat. Meanwhile, Blake had opened the vehicle’s rear lift gate and was unloading bags of gear, trotting back and forth to heave them through the shuttle’s open door. In less than a minute, he and Murphy were back on board, swinging the outer door closed and Blake was shouting, “Go!” to Cordero.

While Raven continued to watch out the window, the marine driving the ground vehicle shifted back into gear and drove sedately toward the exit, the whole station rapidly shrinking in her view as the shuttle gained altitude.

Once they reached a cruising height, Cordero headed for the large landing field on the other side of the city, and Roan’s prowler. Blake started unpacking gear, beginning with handing everyone an armored vest. Despite having practiced putting it on before they left the Casisto, Raven fumbled awkwardly with hers, swearing under her breath it caught on the chair back, and then as she struggled to get the clasps connected.

Peering back out the windows again, her vest on properly, and her senses heightened still further by her awareness that now they were breaking whatever laws governed air traffic in and around Tondisi, Raven spotted at least three-dozen more shuttles travelling over the city, including ones that were distant dark blips on her horizon. Only a limited number of commercial and private services had the right to fly above the capital, she'd learned, for both safety and aesthetic reasons. All of them were marked with the same large numbers that should be visible on this on – so as long as Cordero kept to a normal speed they should blend right in.

On the other hand, when Raven craned her neck even more to look, she could see that ground traffic was a snarled mess. Residents and visitors to Tondisi had clogged the roads as they flocked to the day’s events, bringing all movement nearly to a standstill throughout the valley surrounding the coliseum. If she and Blake had followed their invitation instructions, they too would now be stuck in an idling ground car, just one among thousands of other idling ground cars.

Murphy had resumed checking in with the marines, speaking to each team leader in turn even as he flipped open a small computer that he’d retrieved from another of the equipment bags. Raven watched the ground and the sky, half-listening in as each team leader reported that they were in place and ready to go. Murphy’s final check was with team eight, the one positioned by the Heda’s Tower. Their job was to identify the exact location of Griffin and Roan within the Heda’s convoy once it departed for the southern end of the city.

“Glad to hear your voice, sir. We have a problem.”

Raven’s heart stopped and then restarted with a rush, one short sentence shattering the thrill of the slickly executed hijacking. Her interest in the traffic evaporated and her entire attention shifted to Murphy.

“Go ahead, team leader,” Murphy said.

“Two minutes ago an explosion blew out the windows of floors forty to forty-five, just below the top of the Heda’s Tower, sir. The convoy hadn’t loaded yet. The vehicles are retreating for hard cover now.”

“Any eyes on our hostages?”

“None yet, sir.”

Fuck, Raven thought. Fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck fuck fuck.

Murphy clapped the communicator to his chest and called out, “Captain? Did you get that?”

“Cordero, take the controls,” Blake ordered. Then he was up and moving to Murphy’s side, holding out his hand for the communicator. “Can you pick up any ground chatter?” he asked.

“It’s pretty confused, sir.”

Over the pounding of her heart, Raven listened as the team leader described the chaos unfolding around the Heda’s Tower. Rescue crews, security, and the crowds gathered to send off the competitors all getting tangled up with each other in panic and confusion.

While the team leader spoke, Blake and Murphy were pointing at the computer screen on Murphy’s lap and communicating mostly with their eyebrows as far as Raven could tell.

The echoing rumble of a distant explosion came through the communicator, interrupting the team leader’s report.

“Shit!” her voice echoed loudly across the shuttle. “Four more floors just blew out, thirty-six to forty it looks like.”

“Okay,” Blake said. “That’s got to be kom Nia. Something changed and he’s letting us know we have to come to him.”

Blake punched another button on the communicator. “Calling all teams. Pull back to a 100-meter perimeter around the Heda’s Tower wall. Now. Check in once you’re in place.”

“Visibility, sir?” asked one of the team leaders.

“Our Cefodemorta just blew out the top of the Heda’s Tower. No need for stealth. Focus on speed. She’s gonna need our help.”

“Are we going, too?” Raven asked, once Blake handed the communicator back to Murphy.

“No. We need that prowler more than ever. It’s fully armed and by far the fastest and most maneuverable ship we’ve got on the ground.”

He twisted to lean into the pilot compartment. “Faster Cordero, no need for disguise now.”

Raven realized she was actually wringing her hands, her tension having no other outlet for the moment. She forced them flat and rested them on her thighs, slowing her breathing by counting respirations. Meanwhile she listened to the stream of information as the teams continued to report their progress as they moved across the city to Murphy.

Looking out the windows, she could also see that there were a lot more shuttles in the sky now, painted with various markers indicating emergency or rescue or civil authority. Fortunately they were all headed for the Tower and, for the moment, ignoring them as they flew on northwards.

They were within visual range of the still-distant landing field when she heard weapon fire sounding loudly through the communicator. Raven realized what it had to be just as Murphy called out, “Anti-aircraft fire at the Tower, sir. Aiming for our shuttles, sir.”

“Fixed or mobile?” Blake asked, busy with a handful of thin cables he’d snatched up from another bag, stringing them between the communicator and the computer.

“Fixed, sir,” team eight’s leader said, audible now via a speaker on the computer.

“Can you get a lock on them?”

“Not until they fire again, sir.”

With a distant bang and secondary recoil, the Tower defenders did.

“Target acquired, sir.” There was a long breathless pause, then a louder whoosh and a muffled boom. “Target destroyed, sir.”

The speed of the firefight picked up, more antiaircraft guns emerging to join in the barrage as the rest of the Arcadian shuttles arrived on the scene, counteracting the success of team eight in taking them out. The shuttle carrying team four was hit as it came in, causing it to fall out of the sky and land with a crashing crumple.

Raven winced as the team leader’s second reported in, barely intelligible over agonizingly loud yelling and shrieking behind him. The casualty count, delivered in what Raven felt was an unnervingly calm voice, was one major, two minor injuries to Arcadian Maries, and at least a dozen civilian injuries as they had crashed into a commercial street a few blocks away from the Tower Wall.

Blake and Murphy pulled on headsets about then, and the sudden silence inside their hijacked shuttle was almost overwhelming.

Raven was gripping the arms of her seat, reminding herself that she could hold it together. That everyone was depending on her, that Roan was depending on her, to hold herself together. The mantra helped her to keep her rising tide panic at bay, but couldn’t eliminate it completely.

People were hurt. Probably dying. And all those guns, fired out over the city aiming for the Arcadian Marines? People in Tondisi, and not just marines, were going to keep getting hurt, and hurt badly today.

“We’ve got eyes on the hostages!” Murphy cried out, pulling Raven outside her head. She sagged with relief against the back of her chair with a huge expulsion of the breath she hadn’t quite realized she was holding. If they could see Roan, he had to still be moving. Griffin, too.

She was sure he’d yelled so that she and Cordero stayed in the loop. A guess confirmed when Murphy sang out, “Hostages are on the roof. I repeat. Clarke and kom Nia are on the roof.”

When he saw her looking at him, Murphy shook his head dubiously at Raven, his brow raised in challenge. “Boyfriend’s got a lot of confidence in you, Reyes. We’re going to have to pick them up off the fucking roof. You know how to hover in that thing?”

Raven swallowed, looked him directly in the eye and nodded. “Damn straight I do.”

She’d rebuilt all the thrusters and stabilizers to her own damn designs, far better than the originals installed by the manufacturer. Of course she knew how to get the best out of them.

“Landing field in ninety seconds,” Cordero called from the pilot’s chair. “Troops are forming up on the ground, waiting for us, sir.”

Blake tore off his headphones and nearly leapt into the pilot’s cabin on a single bound. Coming to rest crouched beside Cordero, his voice was a low rumble as he began to issue quiet instructions. Cordero’s flight plan altered as she began to fly in defensive pattern, up and down, rolling hard side to side.

The shuttle shook, rocked almost to the frame as at least some incoming fire found its target. Raven’s heart felt like it was trying to beat its own way out of her chest.

“I think the trap is sprung!” she called to Murphy, mostly to prove to herself she still had control of her wits and her tongue.

Murphy grinned at her as he nodded, pumping his fist in encouragement.

Blake dove for the last bags of gear, dropping down to one knee as he ripped them open to display the weapons inside. “We’re going to go straight in,” he said to Raven, “land as close to the prowler as we can. But in the meantime, we need to shoot back. Can you handle a rifle, Ms. Reyes?”

“I can pull a trigger,” she said.

“Good enough,” he replied. He handed a rifle to Murphy as he rose and strode toward Raven, half-tossing her another weapon, flicking off the safety switch before he did so, since Raven would never have found it quickly enough.

“Lean back,” he said. As soon as she did, he shot out the window in her row, raising his leg and kicking the rest of the mangled plastic away with his heavy boot, balancing himself on the back of her seat. With a quick spin, he repeated the action, shooting out the window on the opposite side. Murphy was on his feet doing the same to the window closest to the jump seat, opposite the outside door.

The wind roared in, buffeting the small craft in the air even more. “Shoot forward and down at a sixty degree angle,” Blake yelled over the nearly deafening sound, and Raven slid back over to the window seat and struggled to follow his instructions.

The weapon vibrated madly in her hands, shaking from the recoil and from the air blasting around her. It was a wonder she didn’t drop it, or worse, shoot into the nose of their stolen shuttle. But she could see the ground troops were scattering. The wildness of her aim was probably at least as frightening as more control might have been.

Cordero flew them in fast, as promised, slamming on the reverse thrusters so hard that the whole shuttle whined and bucked, and the wind cut out abruptly. She set the shuttle down with a hard thump. Blake spun to the front, yelling, “Get out, Cordero! Murphy, get Reyes to the prowler.”

“No, sir!” Cordero yelled back. “You take Reyes and Murphy. I’ve got this, sir!”

“Cordero, that’s an order!” bellowed Blake.

“Bellamy! She’s right!” Murphy was on his feet too, reaching for Blake’s shoulder, jerking him around by a fistful of his jacket and tossing him towards the door, “We need you with us if we’re going to pick up Clarke!”

If Raven hadn’t been watching she would have missed it, but she didn’t. She saw. There was a moment of stillness, a frozen shard of time, when Blake’s face went pale. Then he blinked, came to himself and nodded at Murphy, “Take Reyes!”, and dashed around him and back into the pilot’s cabin for a last minute conference with Cordero.

Murphy fired his weapon out the shot-out windows, and Raven realized she could do the same. She didn’t even try to aim, beyond making sure she wasn’t shooting toward the prowler.

Blake came leaping back, fished out three more guns, slung one around his shoulders, handed one to Murphy and dropped the strap of the third around Raven’s neck. “Get your crutch!”

She had to drop to her knees to find it and fish it out from where it had rolled under the seats. By the time she was upright, Blake was standing in the open outer door, firing away at people who were definitely firing back.

Murphy hauled Raven forward, his hand a vise around her free arm. “Get ready to move.”

And they did.

How she stayed on her feet she never knew. Murphy was dragging her along with one arm while he fired his weapon with the other, but somehow she did not fall. At the door to Roan’s ship she dropped her crutch again, popped the security hatch, and pressed her palms flat into the sensors. As soon as the biometrics scanned and identified Raven’s face and her hands, the prowler door popped open. She slammed the security hatch closed and stagger-hopped for the pilot’s chair as quickly as she could, her hands on the walls for balance as she moved.

She’d never run through the startup sequence so fast in her life, and the warm hum of the engines coming online made her blood sing. Looking out the front window she saw that Cordero was already airborne again, and realized she must be headed back into the city proper.

“Everyone in?” Raven yelled, ripping off her armored vest and fumbling for the pilot's harness.

Blake came pounding down the length of the little ship, shouting, “Take off!”

“I can overtake Roma,” Raven said to Blake as he tumbled into the co-pilot chair. “I’ve got a lot more power than she does.”

She felt giddy with it as they rose into the air. For the first time since Murphy’s pulsar hit her in the back, Raven felt strong and graceful, the prowler dancing under her fingertips. It was a ship designed for this, to skim along surfaces, spinning and turning in response to the slightest movement of the stick, and she wanted to laugh with joy at being able to move again.

“No!” Blake’s sharp tones cut through her haze. “Roma’s going to draw fire as we come in. Give her space.”

Raven actually turned her head to look at him, her hand following and the ship yawing in response. “What?”

“Eyes front!” Blake ordered, even as Raven quickly corrected from the movement.

“But…” Raven started, but Murphy’s snarl interrupted her. “Did you really think we’d get out of this without casualties? That people wouldn’t die trying to save your boyfriend’s ass? That they aren’t already dying?”

Raven blinked, trying to clear away the image of Roma Cordero’s warmly approving gaze, back when Raven was finally all dressed up like a diplomat. She had to use her arm to brush back the tears that arrived from fucking nowhere to blur her vision. Then she sniffled hard and focused instead on shadowing Roma as closely as she dared.

“Who’s handling weapons?” she demanded, “Cause you better do everything you can to save her ass.”

“Me,” said Blake, reaching one long arm over her to flip the necessary switches to move weapons to the co-pilot chair.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Murphy was already in the jump seat in the pilot’s compartment, headphones back on, pulling out the computer from the bag secured across his chest.

Even more emergency vehicles were in the sky above the city, most of them racing as fast as they could go – which wasn’t nearly as fast as the prowler – toward the tower, and Raven had to account for them as they drew closer to their target. The sky wasn’t full, but it was definitely leaning toward crowded.

The Heda’s Tower was in front of them, growing larger by the second as they came thundering in across the city. Black smoke was boiling out of a dozen floors near the top of the building, rushing upwards into the blue sky, and as they drew close enough Raven was sure she saw tongues of orange flame as well.

Tracers of hot yellow-pink light and puffs of white smoke crisscrossed the air around the base of the Tower. Rockets arcing up from inside the curtain wall and aimed up and out toward what Raven figured must be the landing sites of the eight Arcadian teams. The Arcadians were firing back, but she could only see the hot red and yellow flames at impact, followed by smoke.

The dozens of emergency and other airborne vehicles circling or hovering near the tower were all holding back from a closer approach, wary of the anti-aircraft guns of the Tower’s defenders.

Roma cut neatly through the mass to orbit the building from just inside the radius of the wall around the Tower’s grounds.

“Bank wide!” Blake said, “Make a loop outside the marines!”

“Roma’s inside!” Raven cried.

“Yes. She’s going to draw fire around the tower. We’ll take out the last of the fixed anti-aircraft guns. She’ll fly as long as she can.”

“Brace for recoil,” Blake added, and Raven felt the prowler shudder as the pulsar canons fired, again and again, aiming for the guns coming from inside the wall.

Raven worked to hold the prowler in a steady plane, choosing to stay high, nearly level with the penthouse throne room, so as to avoid the congested airspace lower down.

As she continued to circle, Roma pulled the surprisingly doughty little commercial shuttle into a tighter and tighter arc around the tower itself, somehow picking up speed as she did so, and pulling the hot yellow-pink lines after her like she was drawing in the air.

Raven realized she was repeating “shit,” under her breath, over and over. A mantra or a prayer.

One part thrilled for the skill Roma was exhibiting, rolling and bumping as she circled the tower, and one part terrified, Raven wanted to cheer as one by one the ground guns defending the tower stopped firing.

Risking a glance, Raven could see the small figures on the roof, huddling under the giant bowl of the eternal flame.

Wrenching her eyes back to Roma’s shuttle, she was just in time to see two of the last bright tracer beams converge. They hit just behind the shuttle’s engine compartment. The force of the following explosion sent the little craft careening into the tower itself. It smashed across the edges of two floors about halfway down the building, tumbling building materials with it, before breaking into pieces and falling to the ground below like bits of burning confetti.

Blake fired twice more and the ground guns inside the wall fell silent.

“Can you get us in close enough to the roof to hover, and hold us steady long enough to pull them over on ropes?” Blake demanded.

“I can land.” She’d been working through the details in her head, ever since Murphy had announced that Roan and Griffin were on the roof.

“What?!” Blake turned to stare, clearly not believing her.

“I can land,” Raven repeated, nodding over to the deep-space nav system, already adjusted to show her all of the specs she’d need.

“Well,” she added, “not exactly ‘land.’ But I can slide across the top so that the starboard door is resting on the roof, and I’ll hold it steady with the down thrusters and stabilizers on the portside.”

“Are you shitting me?” Blake exclaimed.

“This is a boarding ship! Everyone pretends it doesn’t happen, but this ship was designed to breach hulls and let boarding parties exit smoothly. I just made it better, that’s all. I can hold it steady, half-balanced on the top of a building. Trust me.”

“Is there room for the wingspan?”

“Yes,” she nodded firmly, after re-checking the readouts on her screens one more time, “there is.”

With little nudges, Raven circled closer and closer, until she could see Griffin’s blond hair. Roan stood next to her, his weapons trained on the door to the roof at the base of the eternal flame. He must have blocked it somehow, but she guessed from his stance that he expected it was going to open any second. Then he looked up and saw her. He seemed to understand in an instant exactly what her plan was, and he waved her around to a spot on the far side of structure supporting the flame, for whatever extra limited window of time that would offer.

She did precisely as she’d promised Blake she could, ignoring the steady laser fire Blake was handing out now. It was oddly calm in the eye of the storm, whatever ground guns remained couldn’t fire at them without fear of hitting the building. Or the eternal flame. Or any of the dozen or more hovering, circling Trikru shuttles and helicopters.

The prowler slowed dramatically as Raven reversed the engines. It seemed as if they were floating rather than flying, moving almost ponderously through the air, but it was an optical illusion. They were still moving very quickly, fighting the thermals alongside the building as the eternal flame sucked oxygen upward, and she knew this was the trickiest part. It was like docking, only twice as hard because nothing and no one was going to catch the ship and steady her from the other side. Raven slowed still further, pushing the engines almost to their stalling point. Then the little ship shuddered as it made contact with the top of the Heda’s Tower.

They all felt as much as heard the crumpling of the balustrade as Raven dragged the starboard belly across the edge of the roof, bringing the prowler to a final halt almost too far past the target point, the door dangerously close to the shattering edge.

Blake and Murphy had already dashed back to get the door open. Raven could see Roan and Griffin running towards the prowler, could hear Blake yelling directions, and then Roan and Griffin vanished from her view as more armed figures came boiling out onto the roof, swarming around the base of the flame. She heard the sounds of weapons firing cut off abruptly, and then Blake was bellowing, “We’re in! Reyes! Go, go, go, go!”

She pulled away, taking more of the roof with her, and then she was free and picking up speed, headed almost due east, and then Roan was there, dropping into the co-pilot seat and reaching for the controls. “Switch over in 3, 2, 1, now.”

Raven’s hands were shaking as she let go of the stick, and her arms felt like overstretched elastic bands. When she saw Blake in the doorway she said, “Got any of those juice packs handy?”

He nodded and a second later there was a jab in her shoulder. A few seconds after that strength came flooding back. She turned her attention back to the nav systems, searching for any sign of the Arcadian marines lifting off, trying to find them in the visual noise of all the other airborne vehicles swirling around the tower. She’d finally spotted two of them, when one suddenly vanished from her screen, and she heard Murphy’s voice, “Shuttle three is down, sir!”

Raven didn’t have time to process the information. On the edge of a screen she saw three new ships appear, coming at them fast and flying in tight formation. “Three new vessels from the southwest. Military I think!” she said, because there was nothing else that would fly like that.

Roan glanced over at her screen and nodded. “I see. They’re atmosphere bound fighters.”

“The rest of the Arcadian shuttles? Are they away?” she asked, wondering at the same time how in the ‘verse Roan had been able to tell what kind of ships the blips were.

“Marine teams moving out now, all casualties aboard,” Murphy’s voice came from behind her. He was back in the jump seat, talking into his headphones.

Raven wasn’t even sure to whom he was talking and didn’t try to figure it out, because she’d just realized what she didn’t yet know. “Griffin?! Is she on board?”

“Main cabin, strapped in,” Blake replied. He was standing just behind them, bracing himself with his hands pressed into the slopping ceiling, his gaze glued to the console screens.

Raven craned her head over her shoulder, but she couldn’t see into the larger compartment behind them because Blake was totally in the way. Looking out the front windows again, she saw that the prowler was rising with every second as Roan pushed them higher. Tondisi and its flaming tower rapidly faded away behind them.

Checking the nav screen, she frowned when she saw a second formation of Trikru military fighters come into sensor range. “Roan?”

“I see them. Hold on.”

And Roan swung the ship around in a wide arc, making all of them lean against the pull, Blake staggering a bit until he got his feet back under him, and headed back over the city. They were much higher now than they’d been before, well above the civilian and emergency shuttle traffic converging on the burning tower and looking to Raven like so many insects disturbed around a corpse.

“What are you doing?” Raven asked him.

“Giving them the right targets,” Roan replied, his concentration entirely on his flying, “The Cefodemorta. And me.”

She realized what his plan was a half-second later. Now sharing the same altitude as the fighters, he was flying the prowler straight towards their formations, coming at them broadside, matching his speed, adjusting his angle and heading to pass through the gap between them. It was an extremely impressive bit of flying, especially because he was mostly doing it by instinct, eye and hand, using the instruments to guide him, rather than turning it over to the autopilot functions.

They shot through a few minutes later, roaring out across the suburbs filling the plains beyond the coastal mountains.

The two fighter groups, and now that she could actually see their profiles with her own eyes Raven easily recognized them for the jet fighters they were, began breaking away from their original heading, turning to follow them away from the city proper. Roan’s stratagem was working.

The black and grey sprawl of what had to be the military base that had launched the jet fighters was now visible on the ground ahead, just where the curve of the planet was starting to be visible, a dark grey smudge, quickly growing larger.

As the prowler began to bank more sharply, sending the passengers tilting in the opposite direction, Raven spun her head to stare at Roan in shock. “Are you seriously planning to buzz a fucking military base?”

Roan nodded, his lips curled into a satisfied smirk as he managed the controls. “Yes. Yes I am. Where’re the Arcadians?”

She checked her screens again. “Five, no, now six Arcadian shuttles are heading nearly straight up and out of Tondisi,” she reported. “Burning hard flame trails and, it looks like, running straight for the Casisto.” Then she frowned, “Wait, Roan! There are two, no! Three more shuttles burning straight for space! Who the fuck are they?”

Roan was nodding, his pleased satisfaction visible in the triumphant curl of his lips. “There were combatants from three of the small independent systems out the Solaris arm, all of them as accidental was we were. I gave them the heads up this morning. Looks like they got away too.”

“There’s a communication array in the main cabin,” Roan added, gesturing with his thumb and cutting his eyes up at Blake, who was leaning still closer over their shoulders, his hands on the backs of thier seats and his gaze still fixed on the nav screens and the six small lights that represented his troops. “If you want to talk to your people.”

Blake muttered a quick ‘thanks’ and vanished, taking Murphy with him.

“Strap in!” Roan called after them as they retreated.

The door dislodged from its hook and banged closed behind them.

Raven let out a long, shuddering sigh, the twitching between her shoulder blades that she’d hardly even been aware of finally easing, now that she no longer felt she was being judged by sharp-eyed critics.

She made some adjustments to the deep space nav screens, pulling them back from the tight-in focus she’d used to land on the tower and returning them to their standard view of near-space distances. She focused on the area directly above Tondisi, and this quadrant of Polis more generally.

Which was when she abruptly realized that the near orbits were not just full, but crowded. She had known about the two big standard stations, of course, the kind you’d find above nearly any capital planet. One was the military station she’d passed through coming and going to the surface, and the other was a large commercial station for general passengers and freight. That wasn’t the surprise.

It was all the other ships. Dozens and dozens, from tiny things barely larger than the prowler to four frigates – the Casisto and one from each of the three small independent systems that had been inveigled into participating in the melee – and several large commercial passenger carriers, and ships of every conceivable size and shape and arrangement in between. They were docked at every possible slip at the commercial station, and filled practically every likely nearby orbit.

The Heda had obviously gotten the word out, Raven realized, and people from all over the system had flocked to Polis even since the Arcadians had arrived, all to be present for the launching of her ‘new galaxy.’ Which was still going to be the old galaxy after all.

She finally identified which frigate was the Casisto. It was still maintaining its position in the closest orbit that Trikru control had allowed them, the shuttles hadn’t yet reached it.

Roan finished his turn, straightening out the prowler to fly them straight over the center of the military base. They were too high up and moving too fast for anyone on the ground to even attempt to shoot them down. It was mostly a gigantic taunt, and no doubt just as infuriating as it was intended to be.

Once they were past and out over the open plains, far from the city and its sprawl, he turned the prowler again, making another, gentler arc that pointed them out over the ocean. Once they were on a straightaway, he began pulling them into a very steep climb, the g-forces shoving them all back into their seats as the pressure mounted quickly.

Raven’s ears started popping painfully.

As they gained altitude, Tondisi and the trailing fighter jets disappeared behind them. Soon only the light mass of the city in the valleys was visible, and then only the mountains and the sea. Then the dark line of space was ahead and the planet was curving away below them. They broke atmosphere, still gaining speed, and Raven was forcing yawns so huge she thought she might actually dislocate her jaw, but her ears wouldn’t clear.

Roan seemed completely unbothered. She was both envious and unreasonably irritated by this.

Raven looked forward again, glanced down at the nav screen, saw where the prowler was headed and cried, “Roan, that’s the commercial space station ahead of us, not the Casisto!”

“I know. The shuttles need time to latch to the Casisto and the other frigates. Let the Trikru authorities stay at least partially focused on us.”

“Hey!” the door pushed open and Griffin stuck her head in. “Bellamy says the Casisto is behind us!”

“Roan knows!” Raven assured her. Then she nodded at the station, already growing larger in the sky ahead of them. “Lots of cover in all those ships,” she said to Roan.

Then, torn between looking out the windows and checking the screens, Raven almost missed the new blips at first.

“Are those Trikru gunships?” she exclaimed, having finally located the key to deciphering the different colors and shapes on the nav screen.

“Yes,” Roan said. “They are. There’re too many other ships around for them to fire safely, though.”

“Strap in, Clarke,” he added, and then with a sharp twist he turned the prowler into a series of barrel rolls, slipping between the parked and orbiting ships, picking a path that put as many civilian vessels as possible between them and their pursuers.

Clarke fell into the jump seat with a squawk, and Raven had to swallow back an unexpected, and very unwelcome, surge of nausea that crept up her throat.

Roan was cutting in so closely to some of the other ships they passed that Raven could swear she could see inside the lit windows, startled faces peering out at them. The gunships were trying to shadow them from safer distances, but this meant they were falling behind again.

“Hey! Roan!” Griffin said, leaning forward and speaking urgently, “The Casisto is still behind us, still in orbit!”

Then, leaning closer to Raven, she said, “That was amazing flying back there! Landing on the roof was the total shit! I was expecting to have to dangle from a rope ladder or something truly terrifying like that!”

“Thanks!” Raven grinned and sent her a quick nod in acknowledgment, but she returned her eyes to the nav screens on the console and kept her hands near the weapons keys.

Roan continued to thread them through the traffic, actually slowing down enough to allow the gunships to close some of the distance between them. Raven hoped that was a strategic choice rather than a sporting one.

Raven saw another tiny blip and quickly adjusted the screen she’d been using in the planet’s atmosphere, focusing on the military station.

“I think the military station just launched some fighters!” she said.

“Okay. Time to run,” Roan said, breaking the prowler out toward the open black as soon as he could.

“Not fight?” Clarke demanded.

“No. We’re totally outnumbered and outgunned. All we have left is speed.” He looked at Raven, “Can we try that boost you were telling me about awhile ago?”

“Yes!” Raven said. “Yes, we can. You’ve got nothing in cryo so all that power’s just sitting there.”

“Do it,” he said.

Raven’s hands flew over the controls. She’d imagined trying this in the space near Mecha, under ideal test conditions. But this would have to do.

“Done!” she cried. “Now!” and she flipped the last switch. The new burst of acceleration pushed them deep into their seats, and the gunships and the fighters in the nav screens quickly vanished, falling off the edge and out of view.

“We’re headed for the transfer point on the mid side of the solar system, it’s a multi-hub with a half-dozen destinations, so we’ll be able to lose them,” Roan said, once the burst was over and the prowler leveled out again at the new, faster velocity. “I don’t want this ship or the Casisto to lose momentum to pick us up. The Heda wants Clarke and me far more than she wants anyone else, and if we slow enough to latch on, it might give her troops enough time to catch up." He looked over to Raven, "Have all the shuttles cleared the atmosphere?”

Raven nodded, “Yep. I see six Arcadian shuttles, still in formation, closing in on the Casisto, which has broken orbit and is headed to meet them. The other three are also hooking up with their mother ships.”

“Hey!” Blake barked from the doorway, “I have to get back to my ship!”

“Your executive officer any good?” Roan asked him, still focused on the screens and the view ahead.

“Of course!” Blake sounded offended. “Mbege is a fine officer.”

“Then he knows what to do, he will find us without help, and will appreciate the chance to show his chops.”

“How the hell will he find us?” Blake demanded.

“Where would you look?” Roan said, swiveling to look up at Blake from under his brows, his chin tilted at just the right angle to suggest that he thought the other man was being unnecessarily dense.

There was a brief silence, and then Blake said, “Azgeda System.”

“Yes,” Roan said, turning back to the controls. “We’re going to the Azgeda System.”

Chapter Text

Blake and Griffin retreated to the main cabin, the door banging closed behind them, and Raven looked over to Roan and smiled maliciously. “I hope he enjoys every fucking minute of being dragged someplace he doesn’t want to go.”

Roan burst into laughter. “I hope so, too!”

Raven fluttered her eyelashes, “Can I shoot him? Non-fatally of course?”

“Probably not a good idea.” Roan was still chuckling at her, but he managed to look as though he sincerely regretted it.

“You’re no fun.” Raven glanced at the nav screen, checking for the position of the station-based fighters chasing them. “Damn,” she muttered.

Roan nodded, “I know. They weren’t going to follow us once it was clear they couldn’t catch up. They’ve got a better chance at forcing down one or two of the shuttles.”

“Will they fire on the Casisto?”

“The Commander really doesn’t like being thwarted, but,” he shrugged, “she dreamed up this whole nonsense in order to avoid a war. So, I don’t think they will.”

Raven looked out into the richly star-spangled black of the central core and then back at Roan. “Will there be any Trikru Fleet ships between us and the transfer point?”

Roan shook his head. “There shouldn’t be. The main Trikru fleet isn’t based in this solar system. Most of it is over closer to Azgeda Territory. The rest,” he said with wry expression, “is closer to what's now the Republic of Arcadia. ”

“And if one just happens to be out there?”

“We should know soon. I’ve set the proximity alarms for their furthest reach.” He pushed back in his chair and spun to face her, “In the meantime, we’ve got about an hour until we hit the jump-off, and the course is locked in.”

Raven pushed back in her chair and grinned at him. “Yeah?”

He smiled at her, his expression earnest and proud all at once. “That was incredible flying. You know that, right?”

Raven felt her cheeks heat with pleasure. “I know. But, it’s good to hear.”

“And the thrusters worked to hover just like you promised they would, even with those wicked thermals from the eternal flame. You landed half on the fucking roof, half in the air, Reyes!”

Raven laughed in giddy pleasure. “I was awesome, wasn’t I!”

“And that last burst of speed was everything we needed!”

Raven nodded, unable to keep her grin from nearly splitting her face as she flung out her arms in triumph. “Good thing I’m brilliant, huh?”

He knocked the armrests on his seat upright and then held out his hands. “Definitely a good thing. You’re a remarkable person, Raven Reyes.”

She took his hands and let him half-steady, half-pull her across the small empty space to straddle his lap. “I know I am,” she said, slipping easily into a familiar position, with her chest brushing his and their noses only inches apart. “I’m glad you know, too.”

With his eyes on her mouth, he tilted his head just enough and said, “I do know that,” and then he kissed her.

Or she kissed him. Or they met in the middle. Softly at first, just a series a little brushes, while his hands moved across her ass and her thighs, pulling her closer, adjusting her legs to settle her more comfortably in his lap.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and caught his lips between her own, dragging his mouth open, their tongues meeting and his hand coming up behind her neck. Blood started rushing in her head and heating her palms and she thought she’d never been so damn hungry for him in her life, and he responded as though he felt the same.

Heat spread out from her belly up to her tits and down to her crotch and soon she was rocking against him, the neediest little moans escaping from the back of her throat as she rolled her hips, seeking and finding friction in the seam of her coveralls.

Then she started to slip sideways towards her stupid dead leg, and they had to break off to get rebalanced. She leaned back into his arms and tapped her knuckles lightly against the stiff fabric across his chest and took the opportunity to ask, “What are you wearing?”

“A very sad armored vest!” he looked down at it with some disgust. “We were allowed at least some light body armor by the melee rules, which I swear by all that’s holy the Commander was pulling out of her capacious ass every time someone asked a question.”

“Take it off!” Raven said.

He raised his arm, “You can reach better than me, it straps around the side.”

It took her a few seconds to work out the fastenings, but then she had it off and tossed on the floor behind her, more or less the same spot she’d thrown her own earlier. Underneath the black vest he had on a simple black tee-shirt, tucked into ordinary black fatigues and standard black combat boots.

“Not very gladiatorial,” she said, raising a mockingly scolding brow. Then she adopted an exaggerated pout, her fingers splayed across his chest. “I was actually hoping for a kilt and sandals. And no shirt.”

“Thank all that's holy you didn't say that!" He rolled his eyes, "It probably would have appealed to the Commander’s sense of spectacle.”

“Well,” she caught her bottom lip against her teeth, pulling it out slowly and grinning at him, then leaning close to let her mouth hover nearer his while she watched his eyes, “maybe another time. Just for me.”

“For you, Raven Reyes?” His blue eyes were bright with humor, “I would wear a kilt and sandals.”

Raven ran her hand up to his shoulder and caught his jaw, drawing his mouth to hers. “Promises, promises,” she murmured just before she kissed him again.

This time she worked his shirt hem loose from his belt and then slid her fingers across his abs, scraping her nails against his skin and up his sides and then around his broad shoulders, touching all of him she could reach.

Half-measures could satisfy her only so long, and soon she was gathering the fabric to lift his shirt up and off altogether. Once his arms were free, he went to work on the buttons on the front of her coverall, sliding it down and off her arms, jerking her undershirt up and over her head, then reaching around for the hooks on her bra.

“Let your hair down,” he murmured into her ear as he palmed and rolled her breasts, pulling gently at her nipples.

Raven arched her back, pressing her chest deeper into his hands as she pulled out her hair tie and shook her long hair free. He immediately reached up to thread his fingers through it, pulling it forward and gathering up fistfuls before tugging her in to kiss him again.

Skin to skin, lips to lips, tongue to tongue, and then she was helping him push her coverall down past her hips, his fingers seeking and finding, slipping up and inside where she was so hot and wet, and she was rocking hard and fast and it still wasn’t enough.

“You!” she gasped. “I want you inside me.”

She knew he was ready. More than ready, she could feel him thick and hard as she rocked across his lap. She made short work of his belt and the fastenings of his trousers, reaching for his cock and squeezing firmly, smiling in triumph at the shivering groan he produced in response.

Her brace stymied them long enough for him to say, “Leave it. Just take off your other boot.”

After she kicked her good leg free from her clothes, she sank down, taking him as deep as she could and angling her hips to take him deeper still. Feeling almost weak with relief at the fullness she felt deep inside, at the rough bunching of his open trousers under her inner thighs, she sagged forward against his neck and whispered, “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to feel you.”

“But you can?”

She lifted her head to meet his worried gaze and smiled in relief. “I can.”

With her eyes still on his, she started rocking, not really riding up and down but using her good leg to help set a rhythm. He matched her with his own hips, jutting forward and up as he braced his back against the chair, pushing his foot off the console base with for leverage, a position well tested with time and practice. Then he kissed her again.

She was starting to soar, feeling everything tightening, humming in satisfaction, when the door banged open simultaneously with Murphy’s, “Reyes!”

Then there was a dignified man shriek, sort of a strangled ‘argh,’ and Raven spun her head around in time to see Murphy clap his hand over his eyes and reel backward, crying out, “At least hang a sock on the door or something!”

Raven looked back at Roan and they both started to snicker, and then he started bouncing her so hard and fast she began to slip off his lap. Which made her laugh all the harder, and then he said, “Up against the door?”

“Yes, please.”

Not only did the new position make it impossible for anyone else to push the door open, it was even better for Raven, better for both of them. She got closer and closer to the edge, but the injury, or the pain blocker, or the adrenaline, or the interruption, and her body wouldn’t quite let go no matter how she twisted or arched or rocked in his hands and then his did let go and she was almost sobbing in frustration as he helped her set her feet back onto the floor.

He kissed her again, on her forehead, on her eyelids, on her mouth and then on down her throat and her collarbone, between her breasts and lower. He hooked her dead leg over his shoulder and she braced her arms against the walls in the narrow entry. He knew her, knew what she liked, what she wanted, and what she needed, and finally, finally, finally her stupid body cooperated and her orgasm rushed through her, leaving her trembling and gasping in relief, if not quite spent, even with the aftershocks he pulled from her.

When he rose to his feet, readjusting his trousers at the same time, he pulled her into his arms, against his chest, and just held her while she cooled down, resting his cheek against her hair.

When she eventually let him go, he dropped back to his knee to help her get her pants and her coverall back on.

She moved past him to retrieve her bra and tank top, half-hopping, half-balancing herself on her good leg to fish them off the floor.

Which is when he said, “Raven? Is that where you were shot?”

“Yeah. My lower back.”

She felt his large hand along her spine, and then she didn’t, though she knew he hadn’t lifted his hand away. “This is a pulsar burn,” he said.

“Yeah. Dr. Demon Bitch didn’t want to do a skin repair, said the neurologist would want to see the original scope of the injury.”

“How many days ago did this happen?”

Raven hopped around to face him, her bra dangling forgotten in her hands. “I don’t know. It’s been pretty fucking crazy! Does it matter?”

“How many days?” he repeated, and his expression and tone were both harder and more insistent.

She frowned, and tried to work it out, finally coming up with, “Five? Maybe six? I’m not sure how long I was out of it when we first boarded the Casisto.”

His eyes frosted over, cold and, she realized, terribly, terribly angry.

“Roan?” she asked.

“I thought it was an injury to your leg, not your lower spine. And definitely not from a pulsar blast. How large is the area that’s numb?”

“I don’t know, maybe the size of your palm? A little bigger? Then down through my ass on that side into my leg, and then my whole leg is numb from the top of my thigh to the middle of my calf. Doctor said it hit the nerve that runs all the way down my leg.”

“Finished getting dressed, okay?” he said as he turned for the door. “I need to ask Blake some questions.”

A few minutes later Raven followed him out, leaning on the walls of the short hallway as she dragged her stupid useless leg with her. “Hey, Murphy,” she said as she emerged into main cabin, “have you seen my crutch?”

Then the frozen tableau in front of her registered. Griffin was seated on the built-in bench along one side. Blake and Roan were in the middle of the cabin, glaring at each other, and Murphy was up against the far wall, looking like he’d rather be just about anywhere else in the ‘verse than where he was right at that moment.

Frowning, Raven said to Roan’s shirtless, well-muscled, and, she was secretly very glad, completely scar-free back and shoulders, “Hey alpha dog, I brought you your shirt.”

When he spun around to look at her, she tossed it to him, somehow unsurprised to see that his belt and the top buttons of his fatigues were still open. Learned or instinct, flaunting came as easily to him as breathing.

“My crutch?” she repeated to the room.

“Ah, right,” Murphy cleared his throat. “That’s what I was coming to tell you. The last time I remember seeing it is on the ground at the landing field. Where you dropped it to palm the locks on the prowler. Sorry.”

“Well, fuck,” she said. Then she looked at Roan, who was, finally, fastening his belt after putting on his shirt. “What is going on out here, and why are you upset about how many days it’s been since Murphy shot me?”

“He’s the one who shot you?” Roan hooked his thumb at Murphy, his brows raised in disbelief.

“Yeah, but, not important right now. What’s going on?”

Roan looked over at Blake, who straightened his shoulders, rather like he was bracing for discipline, and said, “There are some details about your injury that we didn’t share with you. There wasn’t time to…”

“Shut the fuck up,” Roan growled, twisting his head and shooting him a side-eye of full incredulous contempt. “You should’ve told her everything right away.” He looked at her, gentling his voice with obvious effort. “There’s a hard time limit to achieve a hundred percent recovery via nerve regeneration after a direct pulsar hit. Thirty-six hours. After that, every day that passes results in an additional one to three percent permanent loss. It’s like frostbite. The nerves and surrounding tissues die. After that, nothing more can be done.”

Raven discovered that she needed to sit down, but the nearest chair was across empty space and she suddenly didn’t trust herself to get there without falling. “So,” she said, terribly impressed with how calm she sounded, and doing some rapid mental calculation, “Thanks to the delay in treatment, I’ve already lost five to eighteen percent mobility and sensation. Permanently. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“On the lower end,” Griffin offered, her voice low and calming. “Bellamy says you were treated with the right protocols within fifteen minutes of getting hit.”

“I need to sit down,” Raven said. “Now.”

Roan moved to her weak side, wrapping her arm around his shoulder and helping her to the padded bench next to Griffin. Once she was seated, he stepped back and said, “Raven…” just as Blake said, “Ms. Reyes…”

They stopped, exchanging glares, and Raven was abruptly completely done with them both.

“Go away,” she snapped. “Just leave me the fuck alone. I can’t take either one of you right now. Go drive the ship or something, but get the hell away from me.”

Murphy promptly scuttled down the passage toward the crew berths. After an uncomfortable pause, Roan bowed his head briefly at her, acknowledging her order, and then turned and headed for the pilot compartment. Blake, sensibly, stepped out of Roan’s way, then followed him out after a fleeting, wordless exchange with Griffin.

Raven leaned into the padded backrest, tipped her head up to stare at the ceiling, and told herself that she would not fucking cry one more goddamned time.

After letting the quiet grow and somehow fill with sympathy, Griffin said, “I’m sorry. It’s not fair that this has happened to you.”

“It’s not your fault, princess,” Raven said, still staring at the ceiling. “It was Blake’s big plan, his call not to leave me at the station for treatment.”

“Yeah. He should have. But then you wouldn’t have been there to get us off the roof, so there’s that.”

Raven turned her head to really look at her. She was dressed in the same black shirt, fatigues and combat boots Roan was wearing. Must have been the costume of the day.

“Why were the two of you on the roof?” Raven finally had the chance to ask.

Griffin made a face, twisting her lips, and regret filed her sad eyes. Then with a sigh, she said, “Lexa,” then paused and corrected herself, “The Commander. This morning, the Commander announced her decision to offer us the opportunity,” her lips twisted again, “to take the chip before the melee, so we could join with her as soon as our bodies failed us. Roan had already guessed that she might do something like that, so he had a backup plan ready.”

“Blowing stuff up,” Raven said, not really guessing.

“Yeah,” Griffin agreed, with a quiet huff of laughter, “blowing stuff up. I don’t know if he timed it or it was just lucky, but it was a very dramatic moment. The Commander was on her feet, her servers were coming out like acolytes with fancy platters, holding them out like they were about to offer us a sort of communion, and then ‘BOOM’,” Griffin waved her hands up, fingers spread wide, “the whole top of the tower rocked, walls cracking, ceiling tiles falling, dust everywhere, people falling over and shrieking. Then Roan grabbed me and we ran. We tried to head down first, but there were too many guards for us, even with the weapons he took off the first few. So we went up instead. He said you’d be able to pick us up.”

Raven smiled. She was still fucking proud of herself for that, no matter how pissed off she was about other things.

“He has tremendous faith in you,” Griffin added.

Raven stopped smiling. “He fucked me on the regular for four goddammed years without telling me who he is.”

Griffin’s eyes softened, and she shifted around until she was sitting facing Raven, her expression earnest and entreating. “I haven’t always told the people I love everything I should have. I thought I was protecting them. It’s an easy mistake to make, and a really hard one to fix.”

Raven was not at all ready to think about what it meant that Clarke Griffin, fucking Cefodemorta of Arcadia, was defending Roan kom Nia, heir to House Azgeda. To her. Raven Reyes, mechanic, ass end of the universe.

So instead, Raven raised her brow and observed, “Haven’t told people you love things like – why you were way the hell out beyond the ass end of nowhere, down the Coriolis Arm almost to the edge, and what the fuck you were doing out there?”

Griffin ducked her head and laughed, her cheeks flushing a pretty pale pink and her dark blue eyes twinkling. “Yeah. Stuff like that.”

“So, what were you doing out there? And how did Roan find you?”

“That’s a really long story, and it’s not all mine,” she raised her hand, forestalling Raven’s objections, “but, it has to do with mutants, and the Commander’s chips. Roan’s been working on some of the same things as I’ve been. He thought I was on the wrong side when he stumbled across me, but once he figured out who I was, and what I was doing, we joined forces.”

“He had you in his cryotank!” Raven protested.

“Yeah,” Griffin waved that away, “That was before he figured out we had similar agendas.”

“Which are?”

“Do you know what the chips are?”

“No fucking clue,” Raven answered, “And I’m definitely tired of hearing about them without understanding what the big deal is.”

“They’re silicon-based tablets,” Griffin explained, “about the size of your thumbnail. The chip breaks down after it’s ingested and then reforms at the base of the brain stem. It does a lot of different things at that point, including blocking pain receptors and interfering with memory. It also gives the Commander AI full access to the chipped person’s consciousness, awake or sleeping. Once the chips have reformed in the brainstem, you’re basically a cog in a linked neural network, run by The Commander.”

Raven wrinkled her nose in horrified disgust.

She continued, “Trikru history is long and obscure about the full origins, but at some point just after the technology was available, someone created an AI to bond with a human, trying to shortcut the path to importing human empathy into silicon systems. Instead they got a power-mad psychopathic computer bent on wholesale human domination.”

“So,” Raven frowned as she worked it out, “the Trikru Goddess was always an AI, not an AI constructed to create the Goddess?”

“Well. She was once. She is a real goddess now, for any practical purpose. Obviously not everyone was happy about getting sucked into her net, and some people turned out to be naturally resistant to the chip. That led to an opposition movement looking to jumpstart and breed that ability back into the whole human genome, all to combat the AI’s growth. That, long story short, is the origin of mutants.”

“I thought they were naturally occurring! That the stretched and bumpy bones and the fused limbs were the result of early space travel, of low gravity and too much radiation exposure!”

“No. They were deliberately engineered, but there were a lot of unexpected consequences and side effects from attempting to foster human resistance to AI corruption, especially because they were in a flaming hurry and took a lot of risks and a lot of short cuts. Mutants are, however, almost completely resistant to the chips now. So, they got that part right.”

“And all the mutant animals?”

“They did a lot of animal testing, too.”

“Some of those are horrible! Like that naked lion/bear thing whose skin oozes irritants!” Roan had actually shown her that one, and he sold it for a small fortune to an insanely rich asshole in the Azgeda System.

“Yeah. Well, the original geneticists doing the work weren’t necessarily the most benevolent people around. They were terrified, furious and in a desperate hurry.”

“So how did they end up, well, mutants? Exiled and unwelcome everywhere?”

“They weren’t always careful about managing the fallout of their worst errors, and lost friends and allies as a consequence. But mostly, they were too slow and too few. The Commander solidified her control and was able to push the mutants off Polis and then out of Trikru space. And keep them out. Hunted and pressed, barest survival is really all they’ve had for centuries.”

“How did you find out about them?”

“Lexa.”

“Lexa? The Commander, Lexa?”

“Before she was The Commander we were in school together. The Arcadian Republic sponsored student exchanges, trying to find ways to get information in and out from under the noses of the Oligarchs. I won a scholarship to a prestigious science academy in Tondisi. Lexa was a student there, a few years ahead of me. She was….”

Griffin’s face actually took on a glow as she smiled at her memories, “Amazing. She was amazing. Anyway, she’d somehow put the history together and was determined to bring the mutants ‘home’ and to respect their desire for individual autonomy in the face of the collective at the same time. She was alive with the desire to right the wrongs of the past. I fell for her cause. And for her.”

It was implied by the distant look in Griffin’s eyes, however Raven said it anyway. “But?”

“Right. But. Lexa was one of the pool of candidates to replace the then current host for the goddess once she died. Lexa was selected when the time came, just over six years ago. Ascension to the godhead changed her goals. She now wants to wipe out the human mutant population as a threat to her ability to bring her peace to the galaxy. I figured that all out during our war with Montovetero. It’s part of what led to breaking the Arcadian-Trikru alliance.”

“How did Roan get involved?”

“On one of his first missions as a soldier, more than a decade ago, he ran across some human mutants who were being smuggled as slave cargo. He got interested in their cause, and started helping them. And, the rest of that story is his own and you need to get it from him.”

Raven scowled at that, and at the same time realized she had some pretty fucking good guesses. For example, the puzzle of his falling out with his mother for heretofore-unknown reasons? His adoption of the mutant cause would work very nicely as a solution to that mystery.

“So what were you both doing in Tondisi?” Raven asked.

“Deals inside deals inside deals, basically. Roan owed the Commander for something that happened six years ago, just after he went into exile. He wanted to clear the debt, I wanted a way to get to Lexa, thinking if I could just find the right words I still had a chance to unlock the woman I knew and loved. I was wrong. Meanwhile, she wanted to jumpstart her new coalition, so our timing was fortuitous from her perspective, catastrophic from ours.”

Raven sighed, and tried to sit up. A wave of pain shooting up from her lower back surprised a hiss out of her. Her leg might be numb, but all the muscles in her hip and back that had to compensate were anything but.

“Ms. Reyes?” said Griffin, her voice filled with concern.

“Pain blocker is wearing off, and you might as well call me Raven.”

“If you’ll call me Clarke.”

“It’s a deal, Clarke,” Raven had to pause to ride out another wave, gripping the edge of the cushion until her knuckles turned white. “I thought it would wear off gradually, but it’s more like a switch just flipped. And I think I really, really overdid today.” Her voice faded out on an embarrassing squeak as another, more grinding, wave hit.

Just then Roan stuck his head into the main cabin. “We’ll be at the jump-off in about five minutes.” He frowned and stepped all the way in. “Raven?”

“Pain blocker just quit,” Clarke answered for her. “What do you have on board?”

“Just a standard emergency kit. Plus cryo supplies, of course.”

“Morphine?”

“Yeah. It’s in the wall case between berths three and four.” He crossed to Raven, crouched down, took one good look at her face, and then scooped her up into his arms with a quick jerk.

Raven wanted to protest, but the movement sent another sharp pain across her back and she just whimpered instead.

“I’ll put her in my bunk,” Roan said.

* * * *

Raven woke up with a start, her head clear and her back pain reduced to a dull ache. Looking around in the dim light of the panel by the door, she recognized the familiar contours of Roan’s small berth.

The last things she remembered was Roan giving her a shot of morphine in her arm, a warm yellow feeling suffusing her body, and the feel of his lips against her forehead.

The clock by the door showed it was about six hours, ship’s time, since they’d made the first jump. She had the vague idea that there would be two or three more before they reached the big hub station Roan was taking them to, but she couldn’t remember how long it would take them to travel between transit points along the way.

She flipped on the bunk light and sat up. On the small shelf she saw a water bulb, and, leaning against it what looked like a piece of narrow conduit piping, to which someone had attached a crude handle, padded with rags and covered in wide, grey utility tape. It was an ugly-ass thing that she’d have to fix as soon as she possibly could, but for a homemade cane, not so bad and, thoughtful, too. She appreciated the effort.

The ship, when she went out to explore, was quiet, and the lights in the main cabin and in the pilot compartment had been dimmed. She found Clarke and Murphy in the pilot chairs, but as soon as she entered, Murphy excused himself and fled.

Raven dropped into the vacated co-pilot seat and asked, “What’s with him?”

Clarke shrugged, the few task lights catching on her bright hair, now twisted up into a messy knot, and turning it almost white. “Roan’s dealing with worrying about you by sending Murphy his most threatening stares every chance he gets. I think at this point Murphy’s starting to wish he’d just kick his ass and be done with it.”

“Huh,” Raven nodded. “I can see that.” She also decided she didn’t really mind. While she no longer wanted to murder Murphy outright, she was still pissed as hell with him for shooting her. Especially now that… well. Now. Murphy running scared from Roan wasn’t the worst thing in the ‘verse as far as she was concerned. “Where are they anyway, Roan and Blake?”

“Asleep. We passed the second jump about ninety minutes ago, it’s five more hours to the next, which will take us right to the big hub station at Huronpoint.”

“Who made the cane?” Raven cocked her head at the hideous and barely-functional object.

“Roan. We all told him it was ugly, but he said you’d rip apart anything anyone else did and remake it yourself anyway, so it was just for you to have something when you woke up.”

Since that was completely true, Raven decided to ignore it. “Where do we all go next, after the hub?”

“Actually, that’s what I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you about,” Clarke turned and looked directly at Raven, her large blue eyes earnest and determined and so full of confidence. “I’d like to take you home with me, to my mom. She’s the Chief of Surgery now at the University of Montovetero med school. She’s not a neurologist, but she’d make sure you had the best.”

Raven lifted her brow skeptically. “Don’t you mean, what’s left of the med school there?”

Clarke winced. “What’s left of the old buildings? Not much, but the hospital system in Arcadia is top notch and so the new staff at the university is excellent. And new construction is proceeding quickly, Bellamy says. Most of the high-end medical equipment in the galaxy is made in the Arcadian Republic, so it’s actually going to be a state-of-the-art facility.”

“Well,” Raven said, slowly working it out in her own head, “Polis is famous for their hospitals, but I can hardly go back there. Or anywhere in Trikru System really, and what with the whole chip thing, I don’t want to either. I’d sure hate to be slipped one on the sly.”

“Right,” Clarke grinned, “and Roan… he doesn’t want you close to his mother, at least not until he and she are, in his words, ‘once again on cordial terms’.”

“Azgeda System is fucking huge! There are at least a half-dozen medical complexes that even I’ve heard of!”

“Her arm is long. She’s the queen.”

Raven thought about that, realized she’d had enough of being a hostage to last a lifetime, and said with a small grin, “Okay. Sure. Arcadia and the University of Montovetero it is. Thank you. And, after all, you guys owe me, really.”

Clarke smiled at her. “Yeah. We really, really do.”

They fell silent after that. Raven sat staring out at the stars, still so much denser than those around Mecha Station, and thinking about Roma Cordero. She wondered if it was fair to ask Griffin, ask Clarke, how she bore it, knowing other people died so that she could live. Then her gaze fell on the cane, and Raven sat up. “I can’t stand it. I have to go fix that ugly-ass piece of crap.”

Clarke smirked in minor amusement. “He left the tool kit in the main cabin. Can I bring you something to eat?”

An hour later, a much more functional and pleasingly attractive cane in hand, Raven opened the door to Berth Two and crept in. Roan was asleep on his back, but woke up enough to shift over when she came to join him. She fell asleep again with his arm heavy around her waist.

* * * *

“So, how does this work?” Raven looked at Roan, who was pressed shoulder to shoulder to her in the center of the big bed, his leg tangled with hers.

He rolled onto his side to face her and propped his head up on his elbow, reaching over to press his palm flat against her belly. His hands were strong and square, with deceptively long, agile fingers, the hands of someone who worked for a living, despite his background.

They’d arrived on the station four hours earlier, during what felt more or less like morning for Raven and the rest of their little crew, but was late at night on the station’s cycle.

“Depends on what ‘this’ is,” he said, raising his eyes to hers.

“Okay. What is ‘this’?” She gestured at the two of them, naked on the big white bed, in a big white on white room, in a very expensive luxury hotel at Huronpoint Hub.

With little to do after leaving the prowler to be refueled and serviced, they’d checked in here. Clarke, Blake and Murphy had balked at the prices and gone elsewhere. Roan had shrugged, then winked at Raven and remarked that the nicest thing about being self-employed was he didn’t have justify anything on an expense report. He could blow his money on whatever he wanted. What he wanted was room service, a big bed, and Raven. She was very happy with all three.

“This is post-coital cuddling,” Roan said, very seriously, as though she might not already know.

“Shut up!” She laughed even as she shook her head at him. Then she tried again, “Do you…” and again, “the word boyfriend is getting thrown around a lot.”

“I know.” His eyes were especially blue in against the white room. Azgeda blue.

“How does that make you feel?” she asked.

“Good,” he smiled at her, and her heart warmed and grew inside her chest. “But…” he trailed off and his smile faded.

So did hers. “But?” she prompted.

He looked at her, watching carefully as he said, “I thought you didn’t want to be a girlfriend, so I’m not really sure how to ‘boyfriend’ in that situation.”

Raven nodded slowly, because that was one of the issues, wasn’t it?

“Yeah,” she said. “I know. That’s been my theory. No commitments. No exclusives. Just,” she fluttered her fingers in the air, “be in the moment.”

“Right, and I know I’m not the only person you spend time with.”

“Right. In theory. Sure.” She reached down to thread her fingers through his, and tugged them so he’d look back at her face. “In practice, you have to have noticed that for the last six or seven months I’m always free whenever you show up.”

His smirk was definitely smug. “Maybe. Yes.” He tried to tone it down, without much success. “What ever happened to that Wick guy?”

“He was fine with the no ties thing, when you weren’t around for that year two years ago.”

“It was ten months.” At her raised brow he amended, “Less than eleven.”

“A long fucking time. And you should probably fill me in on what you were up to, for the next time someone shows up and asks me questions.”

“I will.” He shook her hand lightly. “Keep telling me about Wick.”

She narrowed her eyes at the evasion, but answered his question. “When you showed back up again a little over a year ago and started turning up every few weeks on the regular, he suddenly decided he wanted to be exclusive after all.”

“Right. And you didn’t. That’s not how you roll.”

He was quoting her. She wasn’t entirely happy with how it sounded on his lips. She met his eyes. “Not with him, anyway.”

Roan’s hopeful expression filled her with the queerest wave of relief, almost a physical sensation that washed from her head to her toes.

“But with me?” he said. “You would consider it?”

“I was considering it quite a lot,” she told him, “only… now you aren’t exactly who you were anymore.”

He looked hurt.

She reached over to brush his hair out of his face with her free hand, pushing it behind his ear, and found herself unable to pull away, her fingers lingering on the high arch of his cheekbones, trailing along the angular line of his jaw. “You’re found now, heir to House Azgeda.”

He shook his head against her hand, his short beard tickling across her palm. “My mother wasn’t worried about where I was and she didn’t care if I was lost. If she’d truly desired to know, she could have had me found. What she wants is for me to come home to her on my own, to humble myself and accept her rule. I’m still not planning to do that.”

“But you can’t just vanish again. You know they saw those news vids on Mecha Station, too.”

“It’ll be different, that’s true. I won’t be anonymous any longer. But,” he paused to search her face again, “I’m also not tearing myself up trying to figure out how to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago.”

“Tearing yourself up?” she asked skeptically.

“I didn’t want you to be mad at me,” he confessed.

“That wasn’t going to be an option.”

“I know. That’s where I was stuck.” He did boyishly charming surprisingly well for a man who could have appeared as a barbarian king in a historical vid, no costuming required.

She slipped her finger under his chin and drew his face back towards hers. “You really wanted to tell me?”

She wasn’t quite sure what to do with the hope fluttering in her chest, or with the dawning realization that they really had been on the cusp of something, she and he.

But whatever it had been, unformed and barely more than idle daydreaming on either side, it was gone now. The question going forward was, did they have enough between them to carry over into something entirely different?

“Yes,” he said, very firmly. “I did want to tell you. I’d hoped there was a reason you were always free to be with me, and that it was because you’d made a choice. But I knew I couldn’t move forward with you until you knew my history. Of course,” and his expression was dangerously close to a pout, “I’d hoped to keep it just between you and me.”

“And now?” she asked. “When everyone will know? Where does that leave me, ship mechanic from a broken-down station halfway to the edge?”

He looked up from their linked hands to meet her eyes. “Right where you were. With me right were I was. Still exiled, still not bowing to my mother, still living halfway to the edge in a broken-down station. With you.” He pulled her hand close to rest against his chest, “If you would be willing to try?”

She felt a little bit like she was flying. She didn’t want to think about the inevitable crash and burn. “Yes,” she smiled as she rolled toward him. “I would like to try.”

* * * *

The next afternoon, station time, Raven and Clarke boarded a small, sleek charter ship, very luxe in its appointments, rather like the hotel, and bound for Montovetero. The captain even had shiny gold braid on his old-fashioned cap, and sported bushy grey whiskers.

Raven decided she would not ask or even seek to find out what this cost. What any of it cost. The hotel. The shopping bag full of clothes to replace the ones she kept losing. A shiny new crutch. Between Arcadia and Azgeda, she wasn’t expected to cover the bill. And anyway, given the Captain’s hearty smile and warm hug, he clearly had some prior connection to Roan. Perhaps there was an exchange of favors going on and Raven wouldn’t have to worry that the food budget for a family of four for a decade was being blown to carry her halfway across the galaxy.

Roan himself was headed for his home world. He said he at least owed his mother a full accounting, delivered in person, of what had actually gone down in Tondisi, as she would have to deal with the blowback.

Clarke’s and Raven’s chartered ship was going to be escorted by two small Azgeda scout ships all the way to Arcadian space, where they would be picked up by an Arcadian escort. Raven wished this didn’t make her feel better, that she hadn’t actually secretly agreed with Blake when he threw – for him, which meant lots of glowering and pacing – a complete fit about it before he got what he wanted.

She did know that she wished that there had been some way to secure the military escort other than Roan marching in and introducing himself to the staff of the small branch office of Azgedan Military Security. Causing maximum consternation and fussing and tight-beam communications and finally a vid conference with his mother, the Queen, that left him flat-lipped and so rigid with tension that hugging a support girder goodbye might have been more comforting.

He’d made a massive effort to shake it off, and sort of managed to loosen up a tiny bit. “I will see you on Montovetero, before your treatments are done. I swear it. And in the meantime, we will stay in close communication. Okay?”

The tentative ‘okay’ at the end was the only thing that kept him from sounding like he was issuing orders rather than making a promise to his new girlfriend.

Raven’s goodbyes with Blake and Murphy were short and formal, and she wasn’t going to lie to herself or anyone else. She was really fucking glad to be seeing the last of them. A shuttle from the Casisto would retrieve them a few hours after Raven and Clarke dropped into the transfer point on their elegant little ship.

Once onboard, Raven and Clarke settled deep into the almost too-enveloping seats with a bottle of champagne and plates of crackers and real cheese on the low table between them.

Their first activity was checking all the latest news reports about events on Polis. Which was when they discovered that the entire debacle was being blamed on gas leaks.

“Are they serious?” they shrieked at each other, laughing in vaguely hysterical amazement and pouring more champagne and watching the stories unspool repetitively on every major news network.

The news readers were, apparently, quite serious. Trikru spokespeople were giving long thoughtful interviews about aging infrastructure and natural gas pipelines and explosions. These, Clarke and Raven learned from still more experts, had in turn damaged the Heda’s Tower and also, incidentally, led to very bizarre hallucinations and general head trips all around the city of Tondisi. Invaders and space aliens and attacking mutants and caped superheroes were all variously proposed to explain the damage and vigorously defended in ‘person-on-the-street’ style interviews while sober experts and well-coifed newsreaders tittered at their silly fellow citizens.

The melee was indefinitely postponed.

Two bottles of champagne later, Clarke and Raven had drifted on – because how many times could they really say “are you fucking kidding me?” to each other – and begun to share a lot of real girl talk about first loves and how they faded with time. And what it was like to grow up living in places that were always on the edge of running out of the essentials, even if Clarke had lived on a harsh cold dry planet while Raven had lived on a patched-up space station.

By the time they’d finished the meal brought in by uniformed stewards, Raven was floating on the lovely sensation of making a new friend. And also floating on a lot of champagne, which worked to dull the pain almost as well as any drug offered by the Demon Bitch. As she and Clarke got sleepier and sleepier, Raven was happy to snuggle deep into the reclining chair, wrapped in what she sincerely hoped was a faux-fur blanket.

She was startled awake when the red emergency lights blinked on at full intensity and ear-splitting warning klaxons started blaring. A steward rushed up and breathlessly informed them that they were under attack, and then he rushed away.

Raven looked at Clarke, and then Clarke jumped up and hauled Raven out of the deep chair and they rushed for the windows that lined one side of the lounge. The scout ships were nowhere to be seen. Neither was anything else but the stars. Whatever was happening had to be on another side of the small ship.

“Where are we?” Raven demanded. “Are we out of Azgeda?”

“I don’t think so,” Clarke answered, looking at her watch. “We should be about two hours past the second transfer now, and crossing the outer rim of an uninhabited solar system on our way to the next jump-off. All of it well inside The Azgeda System.”

“Ladies?” They spun to find the charter’s executive officer, a man with fluffy dark brown hair, brown eyes and pale skin, and an old scar on his lip. He was holding a handgun, trained steadily on them. “If you’ll just resume your seats while we wait for the boarding party, please?”

“Who the fuck are you?” Clarke demanded. Without sitting down.

“Ah. Yes. We never did meet in person did we, Cefodemorta.” The man smiled, brutal and toothy with triumph. “My name is Cage Wallace. My father was Dante Wallace. You remember him, don’t you?"

He waited, but Clarke was silent.

Raven looked frantically between the other two, hoping for some sort of a clue about what the fuck was going on. Trusting that the Azgedan authorities would notice their missing ships sooner than later. Hoping Roan wasn’t already home and that he could turn around and come get her as soon as possible. Hating that she couldn’t think of anything to do other than survive until he found her, like some sort of fucking damsel-in-distress, and like he was some kind of hero, like a missing goddamned prince. Fuck.

Wallace tsked in exaggerated dismay, shaking his head at Clarke. "You should remember him. After all," his smile vanished, "you’re the reason my father's dead.”

Chapter Text

“Raven,” Clarke said, as she slipped her arm around Raven’s waist and started inching them back towards their seats, “let me help you to your chair.”

“Touching,” said Cage Wallace. He raised the gun and pointed it straight at Raven’s chest. “But perhaps we should eliminate your injured friend now. Save us the trouble of doing it later.”

Clarke slid in front of Raven, holding out her arms and shielding her entirely from Wallace. “She is my friend, and she’s injured. She’s also Raven Reyes, an Official Representative of the Union of Independent Stations, and recognized as a Neutral Observer to all intra- and inter-system disputes. Her credentials have been received and recognized by The Commander of the Trikru, by House Azgeda, and by the Republic of Arcadia.”

Wallace looked thoughtfully at them, and then he grinned. It wasn’t a nice grin at all. “Interesting,” he said. Then he started nodding. “If this is true, and we will be reaching out to confirm it, this could be a good thing. Very good.” He waved the gun at them again. “Now sit down, ladies.”

They did. Wallace retreated to a seat on the opposite side of the room, watching them and waiting, his gun never wavering. Together the three of them sat in silence as they heard the bumps, electronic grumblings, and the metal on metal squeaks and squeals of a mid-space airlock link being established between two free-floating ships. The klaxons finally quit blaring and the regular lights came on.

Raven started calculating times and distances. Trying to figure out who would hear about them going missing first, Roan or Bellamy Blake, and how soon after that they would figure out what had happened. And how soon after that they would be able to organize some sort of response.

The only mathematically supportable answer was too fucking long.

Looking at Cage Wallace’s twisted face, his eyes burning with dark fury, she honestly didn’t like the odds of her and Clarke surviving on his good will alone until then. They needed to find their own angles to work, and fast.

Then she heard quiet thumps, boot steps softened by the carpet that was laid throughout the charter vessel.

A small group of soldiers entered, wearing full hardened body armor, including shielded helmets. The armor was worn and banged up, but still clearly identifiable by the bright royal blue and bold crimson of Montovetero. One of the soldiers stepped forward, facing Wallace, his shoulder stripes marking him as a senior officer. He pulled off his helmet, revealing himself as a very pale, nondescript man on the near side of middle age.

“Colonel Lovejoy, at your service, sir!” he announced, snapping into a salute.

“Hello, Colonel,” said Wallace, with a broad grin. “Good to see you again.”

“Good to see you, too, sir.”

“I’d like to introduce you to our guests,” and Wallace turned to gesture at Raven and Clarke. “The Cefodemorta, as you know, is the angry-looking blonde on the right. On the left, is Raven Reyes, Neutral Observer from the UIS. She will be our guest as we try and sentence Clarke Griffin for crimes against the people of Montovetero, and for crimes against humanity.”

In the pause that followed, one of the soldiers standing toward the back of the small troop stepped forward, ripping off his helmet as he drew closer. “Raven?” he exclaimed. “Is that really you?”

Raven already felt like she’d entered another dimension as she fell hostage for the second time in as many months.

But this, this took otherworldly to an entirely new place.

“Finn?” Raven blinked again and again, trying to clear away the impossible. “Finn Collins?”

“Yeah,” he said, “Raven, it’s me. What are you doing here?”

“Sergeant Collins!” bawled Colonel Lovejoy. “No one gave you leave to remove your helmet or address the prisoners!”

Finn looked startled and then faintly aggrieved, Raven thought, but he put his helmet back on anyway and stepped back into the line.

Surrounded by the soldiers in red and blue armor, Raven and Clarke were hustled off the small charter and onto another ship. Raven could feel the waves of frustration coming off the soldiers that she wasn’t able to keep step with their drill march pace, but even with a new crutch from the hub station she could move only so fast and no faster.

As they crossed the short hallway that led to the front of the ship and the pilot compartment, Raven glanced up and well and truly stumbled at the sight of the bodies piled there. The jolly captain lay sprawled and ungainly against the wall, his white uniform stained red with blood, his cap fallen unnoticed to the floor where it had been stomped flat by someone’s boot. Three other white uniformed figures had been dropped higgledy-piggledy, as though they’d just been tossed there. Like trash.

One of the red-and-blue-armored soldiers swore at her clumsiness, but then another one came up behind and caught her arm, helping her stay on her feet and keep moving. She was certain it was Finn, but she couldn’t tell any of them apart when they were wearing helmets.

The link between the ships was fully pressurized, but it had no gravity. For ten wonderful seconds, Raven’s injury stopped impeding her ability to move as she wished. Then they hit the artificial gravity of the new ship. It was crushing in too many ways for her to count.

They’d been denied any opportunity to see it from the windows, but once onboard it felt to Raven like a large ship, one significantly larger even than the Casisto. It was clearly a naval vessel. Everyone they saw was in uniform. Patched, faded and mended, but clean and worn with pride, the red, white and blue crest of Montovetero flashing on every breast.

They reached a hallway junction and Colonel Lovejoy, the officer in charge, directed half the men to escort Clarke down one of the two arms. Without Raven.

“Hey! Colonel Lovejoy!” Raven called out. “I think I will stay with Ms. Griffin for now.”

Finn pulled on her sleeve and hissed, “Raven, stop!”

Raven ignored him, addressing Lovejoy, who had signaled his men to halt and was looking and listening to her. “As a neutral observer, I will be able to guarantee that you have followed all of the galactic conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, if you let me stay with her.”

Raven had no idea if there were any such things, but it seemed like there ought to be conventions governing treatment of prisoners of war. Lovejoy either knew, or like Raven, thought there should be as well, because after a few seconds he nodded. “Keep them together. Put them in holding area one.”

Finn managed to be the soldier assigned to help Raven down the hall, and he was still whispering urgently. “Raven! I don’t know what you’re playing at, but don’t push this. You can’t bluff Wallace, not forever!”

“Stuff it, Finn,” she said without moving her lips. Much. “I’m not bluffing.”

Once they’d been escorted to a holding area, which was yet another big cell Raven discovered, she turned to the soldiers. In the moment of entering the room, she’d lost track of which one was Finn. Which was probably for the best, she told herself. “If you would bring us water, please?”

The one in charge nodded and they left, the door whooshing quietly behind them.

Raven turned to find Clarke standing in the middle of the room. Clarke gestured at a bench, and they sat down together, shoulders brushing. After a few seconds, Clarke said, “So. Finn? The Finn? First love Finn? Writer of soppy letters Finn?”

Raven just shook her head, still trying to process everything. “Yeah. That was Finn. And no, I have no idea how in the fuck,” Raven threw her hands up in the air and waved them around at the room, implying the ship, the solar system, hell, this half of the galaxy, “he ended up here.”

Clarke smiled, but the look in her eyes was calculating. “Perhaps you’ll have the chance to ask him?”

Raven met her gaze, sobered quickly and nodded, “I hope so, too.”

Then, though she figured nothing they said was private, her first question was hardly top-secret caliber anyway, so she asked, “Who the hell is Dante Wallace?”

Clarke took a deep breath, let it out with a sharp hiss, and said, “Was. He’s dead. I shot him. Multiple times. But before that, Dante Wallace was the president of the Council of Oligarchs. He had been for nearly forty years.”

“I see,” Raven nodded, reminding herself that they’d been at war. “Why did you shoot him?”

“They had us cornered. They thought. When I told him we’d mined the whole city and I could blow it at any time, flattening it while killing about half of the remaining population of Sanaero, he thought I was bluffing. Maybe I did, too.” Clarke tried for a weak smile. It faded fast, “But,” she looked directly at Raven. Her eyes, normally so bright and alive, were dark pits, full of regret and pain. “I wasn’t.”

“And Cage is his son?”

“I guess.” Clarke shrugged, “Never seen him before.”

“How did you end up being the one to make the call to set off the bombs?”

“When the alliance failed, leaving us stranded, I was captured in the wreckage of our joint headquarters, making a last stand of sorts there. It gave the majority of our forces the chance to escape and reform in Arcadian space. Of course, I was also a trap. The city itself was a trap. To give our forces the time they needed. Wallace just didn’t know that, didn’t believe that I could and would set it off.”

Raven wasn’t sure how to respond. What did you say to someone you were really starting to like who’d just admitted what you already kinda, sorta, well-and-truly knew? That they were personally responsible for wholesale murder on an unimaginable scale?

Finally Raven just reached down and wrapped her fingers through Clarke’s, squeezing gently. “I don’t think anyone can know, until it happens, what they are capable of.”

Clarke didn’t look at her, but she nodded, and squeezed back.

They sat like that until guards, fortunately not in armor, arrived to escort Raven away. They took her to a small communications room, near what had to be the main bridge. Cage Wallace was waiting for her.

“Well, I have to hand it to you, Ms. Reyes. I half thought Griffin was bluffing, trying to save the life of her friend. Turns out you’re legit. I’ve been speaking with a representative of the UIS, Diana Sydney, and she has produced your documentation for us.”

“I’d’ve thought you realized by now. Clarke Griffin doesn’t bluff.”

Wallace, tipped his head at her, his smirk still firmly in place. “Ms. Reyes.” He met her eyes again. “You’re here because your Chancellor Sydney requested an interview.” Wallace stepped back to reveal a deep space communication array, and gestured to the seat. “Please. She’s standing by.”

Raven took the chair, and after a few seconds the grey screen resolved to the face and shoulders of the Chancellor of Mecha Station and UIS official, Diana Sydney.

“Ms. Reyes,” Sydney smiled, her eyes warm in the way only very practiced politicians managed, “you have certainly been having a busy few weeks.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I wanted to remind you, personally,” and Sydney’s expression became very grave, her eyes almost burning across the interstellar distances as she articulated slowly and carefully, emphasizing nearly every word, “that you must adhere to the terms of the neutral observer protocols.”

“Of course!” Raven said, wondering when or if she’d ever even seen the neutral observer protocols. Blake certainly hadn’t given her a copy, but she was pretty sure that flying a prowler onto a roof to pick up fleeing hostages did not count as ‘neutral.’ Good thing that had officially never happened!

“I know it can be difficult,” Sydney continued. “We all form opinions about who is in the right, and who is in the wrong. But that is not our role. The UIS has achieved a hard won independence in galactic affairs, preserving our freedom of association to deal with whomever we wish, however we wish, on whatever terms we choose to accept, and, equally importantly, to decline those offers which hold no interest for us.” Sydney leaned slightly forward to further emphasize her words, “Carrying out the neutral observer role – to watch, to bear witness, to record – is part of what guarantees us this freedom.”

Raven nodded and said, “I understand,” even though she was realizing she had no idea what she’d gotten herself into and was most likely entirely out of her depth. She was a mechanic, for fuck’s sake, not a politician or a diplomat!

“Ms. Reyes, every time a neutral observer arrives to carry out an assignment, the security of the UIS rests in their hands. We trust in you to protect us all.”

Raven swallowed, the magnitude of the responsibility that she’d just agreed to carry settling very heavily onto her shoulders. This wasn’t merely a handy tool to stay near Clarke, whatever Blake had thought of it when he made it happen. It was an actual assignment from the UIS, from her own chancellor. It was a part of the delicate work that kept all the independent stations, stations like Mecha, her home, independent of all the utter crap that filled the rest of the galaxy.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Labor in peace, Ms. Reyes.”

“In peace, Chancellor Sydney.”

Cage Wallace was waiting for her outside the door. “Welcome to the Astrid, Ms. Reyes. Flagship, and last remaining ship, of Montovetero.”

“What happened to our Azgedan escorts, Mr. Wallace?” Raven asked him.

“Azgedan escorts?” he said, eyes wide and his smile disingenuous. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“We left Huronpoint Hub accompanied by two Azgedan scout ships, Mr. Wallace. I know you must have seen them. I certainly did.”

“Oh, I guess I recall something like that. They must have been called away. They didn’t follow us into the second jump-off.”

Raven schooled her features to remain as calm and still as she could. Wallace had just lied directly to her face, despite her status as a neutral observer. “I’d like to return to Clarke Griffin,” she said.

“You’ll be able to visit her after the midday meal. You’ll find she’s in excellent condition. In the meantime,” Wallace broke off, smiling broadly as he turned to face someone approaching them from behind her. “Ah, Sergeant Collins!”

Raven turned to see Finn, sans armor and in uniform, drawing up. He looked nervous. Which definitely made her nervous.

Wallace was still smiling genially, talking to Finn. "As it seems you know our guest, you’ve been assigned to be her guide while she’s with us. Please escort her to her quarters, and take your time. Enjoy the opportunity to catch up on your lives."

He smiled toothily at them both, and then walked off.

Finn saluted, then still looking a little bit anxious, he gestured for Raven to come with him, leaning sideways to bring his head a bit closer to hers as they walked. He kept his face and his eyes forward though, Raven noticed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About earlier. I really thought…”

“You didn’t think, you mean,” Raven hissed, suddenly unbelievably angry at his presumption that she and Clarke had been lying. “You didn’t think that I could actually have an important role in the ‘verse.”

“Raven! That’s not fair. You’re a brilliant mechanical engineer. I expect you could oversee the construction of anything, from a space station to a….” he floundered.

“A cane,” she offered him, her anger already dissipating in the guilty apprehension she saw in the face of the boy she’d once loved.

“Or a cane,” he smiled gratefully at her, worries relieved. “You could build either, all of it, better than anyone. I’ve never doubted that. I just didn’t really see you in politics, you know?”

“And I never expected to see you in a soldier’s uniform. Especially in a Montoveterian uniform.”

“I know,” he flushed a little. “It’s not really where I thought I was headed either.”

“You left to join up with that terraforming outfit. What happened after that?”

“Two years ago we took a contract to help terraform a world not far from here. One eventually set aside by House Azgeda for the largest settlement of surviving Montoveterians. It was a good gig. Really interesting from a planetary engineering perspective. We also worked closely with the new settlement, took on a lot of settlers for day labor.”

“Huh. I feel like I know where this is going.” Raven smiled fondly at him, and however sad and irritated she also felt by what had to be coming, she decided to keep it to herself. You could only mourn the first boy you ever loved for so long before you finished growing up. And you had to let him grow up as well. “You met this girl.”

He nodded and ducked his head self-consciously, but he couldn’t stop the wide, proud grin from eating his face. “Yeah. I met this girl. Her name is Keenan.”

“Smart?”

“Of course!”

“Pretty?”

“I think so,” he was laughing.

“Old enough for you?”

“Yes! Raven?!”

“Does she have family?”

He shook his head, his expression darkening. “Other than me? No. Not anymore. Her folks died on Montovetero, in Sanaero.”

“Other than you? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” She smirked at him.

He flushed again. “No. Or, I don’t know. But we are family. The Montoveterians are a little old-fashioned, and housing is tight. Single adults don’t get individual rooms. They have to live in barracks. So. We…” he swallowed, then smiled brightly, “we’re married.”

Raven waited a heartbeat or three for the heartpain she thought would surely accompany this announcement. Only it didn’t. She broke into a truly happy grin. “Finn! That is wonderful! Really and truly!”

He ducked his head. “Thanks.”

“But that still doesn’t explain,” Raven waved her hand at him, taking in everything. The uniform, the Montoveterian crest, the short military buzz cut. “This.”

“To stay in the settlement with Keenan when our outfit finished the contract and pulled out, I had to take an oath of citizenship. And then I needed a job. So,” he shrugged, “here I am.”

“So, do you know? What they’re planning, snatching Clarke like that? You know we had an Azgedan escort. Two scout ships! What happened to them?”

“Here we are,” Finn said, striding ahead of her to reach a door about halfway down the hallway. “Your quarters, Ms. Reyes!” He hit the panel to open the door and waved his arm with a flourish.

* * * *

Over the next standard ship day (the ninth day since Murphy hit in her in the back with a pulsar, noted a new, unstoppable little clock, ticking away in her head, nine to twenty-seven percent irrecoverable loss of mobility and sensation) Raven asked for and received access to the formal protocols for UIS neutral observers.

Once she’d read them so often she had them nearly perfectly committed to memory, she asked for a copy of the Montoveterian criminal code and the rules for their judicial proceedings. Armed with information and an idea, she went to sit with Clarke after her evening meal.

This was the third visit with Clarke that Wallace had allowed Raven, making much of honoring her role in bearing witness. Finn accompanied her to each one.

Dressed in the traditional bright orange coverall of the prisoner, Clarke sat on one side of the table in the interview room and Raven on the other.

“I don’t know if you’ve worked with a neutral observer before,” Raven began.

Clarke shook her head, indicating she hadn’t.

Raven continued, “I can’t intervene in any action. But I can ask for clarification. And,” she made sure to catch Clarke’s eyes, raising her own brows as meaningfully as she could manage, “I can answer questions from any party about any and all procedures and policies.”

Clarke nodded slowly. “Okay. What are the procedures and policies relating to me?” she asked.

“You will be brought before the judicial tribunal – Montovetero has only one combined judicial system, rather than the more common three – criminal, civil, military – and the charges will be laid. You must answer yay or nay before the trial can begin.”

Raven paused, saw Clarke nod slowly, and then she continued, “If you do not answer, you open yourself up to a variety of consequences, depending on the severity and urgency of the case before the court. Including being fined, jailed for contempt, even shock lashes.”

“And if I refuse to give any answer?” Clarke asked.

Raven held herself just as still and tense as she’d been before, refusing to let her body give her away. “The trial cannot proceed until you do.”

Raven met Clarke’s eyes then, trusting she’d heard everything she needed to hear.

“I understand,” said Clarke. “What next.”

“Once you answer, it’s a pretty standard set up. If you agree to the charges, of course, they go directly to the sentencing phase. If you deny the charges, then evidence is presented by the complainant, in this case the government of Montovetero in exile. Then the defendant, you,” she nodded at Clarke, “has an opportunity to respond, and then the panel of judges consult, ask for further clarification if they want any, and render their decision. Then they move on to sentencing.”

“Do I get an advocate? Or am I on my own?”

“Only if the judges – usually three but up to eleven – agree. Traditionally, they do.”

“For me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know what the charges will be?”

“I do. I’ll read them to you. It’s a long list.”

It was a very long list. It was basically a restatement of the entire public record of Clarke’s role in the late war. It concluded, of course, with the charge of attempted crimes against humanity for Clarke’s action in triggering the final destruction of Sanaero, Capital City of Montovetero. The punishment for all of them was death by hanging.

Clarke listened with her eyes closed, and when Raven was finished, she said, “Thank you. I’d like to be quiet now. But it’s very nice to have you with me, for as long as you can stay.”

Raven nodded and they sat together until their time was up.

“How can you just sit there with her?” Finn asked as he escorted her back to her quarters.

“What?” Raven had been busy inside her own head, trying for the latest time to calculate exactly how long it would have taken Roan to get the news that they had missed their rendezvous with the Arcadian escort, how quickly she could reasonably expect him to figure out what happened, how fast he could put together one of those daring rescues she'd read about in his old Special Forces files.

“She’s a monster, Raven. All of them from Arcadia are! They killed everyone they could and exiled the rest.”

“Everyone has a story, Finn. The Arcadians have theirs.”

“They didn’t want to pay their fair share for shipping their goods out on Montoveterian networks. That’s it. A trade dispute, Raven! All that death and destruction over money!”

“Come on, Finn! You know it was more than that. The UIS supported Arcadia in every single action they brought against Montovetero through the tariff and trade dispute resolution board.” Raven had taken breaks to read up on the recent history of both the Republic of Arcadia, and of Montovetero.

“The UIS always supports the weaker party,” Finn made a face, dismissing the UIS with a quick flick of his hand.

“Well. At least you recognize Arcadia was the weaker party!”

“Until the war. Then it turned out there was no action too vicious, too underhanded, to brutal for them to contemplate. They killed whole armies, to the last man! They wiped out whole cities. They accepted no surrenders. Refused to negotiate terms. And when it was over, they exiled everyone, and murdered anyone who tried to stay in their homes. In Semet Province they killed everyone. Everyone, Raven! Men, women, children! There is not a single survivor from Semet anywhere in the ‘verse!” Finn’s voice had risen as they walked and by now he was nearly shouting. “They are monsters! Clarke Griffin is a monster, Raven! When she blew up Sanaero, she killed almost a million people! How can you just sit there quietly with her?!”

Raven glanced apologetically at a group of soldiers walking toward them, but then she realized they were nodding along, their faces contorted with agreement. Then they cheered.

She fixed her jaw in an effort to keep her face smooth. “I’m a neutral observer, Finn. It’s my obligation and my duty to watch, to bear witness, and to record. My personal feelings aren’t relevant.”

* * * *

They arrived on Najemo, the planet housing the largest settlement of Montoveterians, the following morning.

(Ten days, Raven’s little clock told her. Tick tock. Ten days since she’d been hit. She was convinced that she could feel nerves dying. That the pain in her hip and her back was actually fading now, slowly turning into a terrible emptiness. Ten to thirty percent irrecoverable loss.)

All the way down in the shuttle Finn carried on and on about the terraforming, pointing out new features with every advancing minute. She watched him as much as she listened to anything he said.

His enthusiasm and excitement reminded Raven of the boy she’d known. The one who had given her shelter, food, comfort, and love at times in her life when her own mother, hopelessly chasing a high that got harder and harder to find the deeper she sank into her own hell pit, turned violent or simply disappeared for weeks at a time. She would have dragged Raven down after her if it hadn’t been for Finn. And, to be fair, Finn’s parents, Raven realized now. They might not have warmly embraced her, but they had never turned her away from their door or their table either.

Raven did pick up a few bits of information about Najemo from Finn’s enthusiasm. The planet did have a water-rich, oxygen-based environment, but the air was too thin to support human life. So they were melting portions of the ice caps in huge desalinization plants at the poles, splitting out oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen was released, the hydrogen went to fertilizer, fueling bacterial growth in both the huge swamps that filled one of the three continents, and in the prairie they had seeded across the entirety of another. The third continent, the smallest, was where the settlers lived since they arrived, most of them just six to nine months ago. They had settled in one huge temporary city while they struggled to convert shallow rocky soils into productive agricultural land.

The trial opened immediately after they landed. As in, their shuttles landed, ground transport was waiting for them. They were driven immediately to one of the only significant permanent structures in a city otherwise filled with long low rows of identical, prefab boxes.

The building turned out to be a large auditorium, a thousand or more people crammed into every seat and standing almost two-deep along the walls. Still more were gathered in the large empty space around the building, and watching them arrive on giant screens that Raven supposed had been erected for just this event. A panel of seven judges sat at the rear of the stage, facing the audience. And there were cameras everywhere, mostly focused on the single podium that faced the judges. The prisoner’s dock.

Clarke, in her bright orange coverall, her hands bound in front of her, was escorted directly to the podium.

Raven, with Finn ever present at her elbow, took the seat reserved for her in the front row.

Cage Wallace stepped into the middle of the stage, a microphone in his hand, looking far more like a cheesy game show host than Defense Minister for Montovetero in Exile, a position Raven had only that morning learned he held. Wearing a shiny two-piece suit, because, Raven sneered privately, of course he would favor the look of spoiled rich boys fifteen years his junior, Wallace launched into his opening statement.

Speaking directly to what Raven quickly realized were the cameras as much as the crowd, his image projected on the huge screen behind the heads of the judges, and on all the ones set up out of doors she assumed, Wallace began by reciting the grievances of the Montoveterian people. Raven understood that it was her duty to listen, but she couldn’t help shifting uncomfortably in her seat as Wallace waxed on about the incredible services Montovetero had offered the galaxy, discovering and opening up the transfer network, leading the way for the exchange of goods and knowledge and people, fostering the development of new worlds, and in return had asked for so little.

By the end of his speech, Raven thought he could have reduced the whole thing to a simple declarative, “You owe us, bitches.” But the people around her were hanging on every word, nodding and occasionally raising their hands and calling out in approval at a particularly touching claim.

Eventually Wallace dragged his way to the sorry tale of their ungrateful former colony of Arcadia. He shared how the Arcadians were determined to be free, even though it was obvious it would never work out, and the Arcadians had just been too stubborn to recognize the truth. Montovetero, like any good parent, had let them go. But Arcadia had insisted that Montovetero continue to support them, like a child who left home but needed to depend on parents to cover their expense accounts.

At that one Raven broke, leaned sideways and whispered to Finn, “Expense accounts? Really? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Finn shushed her, but grimaced his agreement.

The crowd however, yelled out a hearty, “We hear you!”

“And then,” Wallace was working his way to the big reveal, the crowd was practically vibrating, a forest of waving arms, “when no other option was open to us, with regret in our hearts, we were forced to closed the hubs. How could we have known that would trigger war?”

“Oh right,” Raven hissed, “Who could have known?”

Wallace told the story of the war, a highly edited and elided version even based on Raven’s very recent, cursory knowledge, concluding with the truly horrific destruction it wrought on Sanaero. As he spoke, images of Montovetero appeared on the screen behind him, bright, color-saturated art from travel brochures, immediately followed by pixelated news footage of bombed out cities, burned corpses, devastated agricultural complexes, and stadiums turned to rubble.

The screen faded to black. The stage faded to black. Wallace fell silent. The crowd waited.

Then a single spotlight illuminated Clarke. In the vivid orange coverall, with her bright hair shining, she looked almost like a figure made of fire.

“If it please the court,” cried Wallace, from the dark, “I present Clarke Griffin, Cefodemorta, Bringer of Death to Sanaero, war criminal, murderess, defiler of corpses, the woman who has admitted to slaying my own father as he stood helpless before her.”

“Let us hear the charges,” said the Chief Judge, from a small globe of cool blue light.

Another man, this one in military uniform, was revealed on the edge of the stage.

“The court recognizes General Carl Emerson,” she said.

General Emerson read the charges. All of them.

The lights came up gradually as he did so.

When he finished, the Chief Judge, a woman in late middle age with severely slicked back hair and very definite eyebrows, looked to Clarke and said, “How say you, Clarke Griffin?”

And Clarke raised her chin, folded her hands on the podium, and said nothing.

“Ms. Griffin?” The judge looked annoyed.

Clarke said nothing.

Raven started breathing very shallowly.

“Ms. Griffin? You must answer the charges!” The judge sounded even more annoyed.

Behind Raven the crowd began to shift, and then to mutter, and then, after the third time the judge called her name, braver members of the crowd began to call out names, the politest of which were ‘murderer’ and ‘baby killer.’

The judge banged a gavel, muting the crowd, then glared at Clarke. “Ms. Griffin! You may not thwart the proceedings of this court! Make your answer!”

Clarke remained silent.

The mood grew angrier, and Raven began to wish that Wallace would take the stage again, calm things down before something was thrown, or worse.

As if her thinking about him had conjured him up, Wallace appeared again. He held up his hands for silence, and then he turned to Clarke. He explained the rules, which required her to answer the charges and asked if she understood them.

“Yes. I understand the rules,” she said.

“Will you make an answer?”

She would not. She refocused on her hands on the podium.

“Do you understand the court can impose a consequence for your refusal to respond?”

“I understand that there will be consequences,” Clarke said.

Wallace turned to the Chief Judge, and with a gesture invited her to continue.

“Ms. Griffin. This is the last time I will ask. How say you in answer to the list of charges read against you?”

Clarke remained silent.

“I see,” glowered the judge. “In recognition of the grievousness of the charges, and the serious nature of the offense in blocking the court’s investigation of these charges, we sentence you to ten shock lashes. To be carried out immediately.”

Raven felt the blood drain from her face.

Two stanchions began to rise from the floor of the stage, one on either side of Clarke, and once they were fully emerged, Raven realized that there were already manacles hanging from the top. A pair of uniformed soldiers marched briskly out onto the stage while they were rising. With cool efficiency they clasped the manacles about Clarke’s wrists, then adjusted the straps until her arms were raised wide and above her head.

Then one of the two stepped around to Clarke’s back, which put him in front of her from the audience’s view, and with a small knife cut and then tore open the back of her coverall, pulling it away until Clarke’s bare back was exposed nearly to her ass. He seemed momentarily flummoxed by her bra strap, but decided in favor of thoroughness. He sliced through the shoulder straps, opened the back and pulled the now ruined garment off and tossed it to the floor at her feet.

Then a third soldier appeared, shock lash in hand. With no further ceremony, he strode over to Clarke, and with General Emerson calling the number, delivered the first shock, holding it for the full two-second discharge.

Emerson called the numbers slowly, dragging out the anticipation in the rests between each lash, letting tension build and then release with the sound of the sizzling prod against Clarke’s skin. The audience began to move with him, leaning forward with lash when it was pressed to Clarke’s back, grinning when Clarke arched in pain, sagging back against their seats when the lash was removed, repeating the cycle all over again for the next. And the next.

They reveled in it, the audience. This was better than any trial they had imagined. This was violence and retribution served up live and in living color right in front of them, and they devoured every moment of it with an almost orgiastic enthusiasm.

Raven knew she would be sick later, when she could. Hoped she would. Hoped she’d be able to vomit out, to purge herself of all the hatred and the excitement flowing through the room.

Clarke was silent for the first three lashes, but cried out for the rest. By the end, she was hanging limply between the pillars, weaving on her feet. She refused to answer when the question was put to her again. Court was dismissed for the day.

Raven’s face was wet with her tears, but she did not move to wipe them off and she did not look away. She was there to bear witness, and so she would.

* * * *

Once the crowd filed out, after the judges left the stage, after the lights came up, after Wallace dismissed them by inviting them to return the same time tomorrow for proceedings to begin again, Raven found a person in uniform and insisted that they take her to Clarke. She swore that it was her responsibility to see that Clarke was being treated appropriately for her injuries.

They took her to Clarke.

She was being treated in a small clinic associated with their prison, resting on her stomach on a medical gurney in a private room with guards outside the door and window. Raven wasn’t allowed to stay, but she was momentarily able to get close enough to gently stroke Clarke’s hair back from her face while she asked if she was being treated properly, did she understand the nature of the proceedings, did she have any further questions.

She did. Clarke asked, “Will my mother be notified that I’m on trial?”

“I will find out,” Raven promised.

It took time to be brought before Wallace, and when she put her question to him, asking if Abby Griffin had been or would be notified about her daughter, Wallace burst into laughter, laugher so enthusiastic he actually ended up wiping tears off his cheeks.

Raven sat straighter in her chair in his office, a bare room with a concrete floor and a view to the setting sun.

Wallace, once he was under control, leaned forward across his big desk, nothing more than a pre-made door laid across two sawhorses, and said, “Ms. Reyes, everyone in the galaxy will know sooner or later.”

“Excuse me?”

“Those vids aren’t just for the crowd, or for you, though of course you will be receiving your own copies for your record. They’re being broadcast to the galaxy. In real time. We want everyone to know and understand our course of action here. To see how our hand has been forced. When they refused to come to our aid, to support us in our attempts to achieve redress for being exiled from our homes, they left us no choice but to pursue justice ourselves.”

Raven could only stare in silence. She didn’t say what she was thinking, which was ‘have you completely lost your fucking mind?’

The Queen of Azgeda had thrown out her own son for a private disagreement. A public challenge to her authority – in her own fucking system – was not going to pass without a blistering, potentially even deadly, response.

The next afternoon (day eleven, the little clock squalled loudly in Raven’s head, eleven to thirty-three percent, came the echo) brought a repeat performance, though Raven noticed that Wallace had obviously been working on his presentation of the woes of Montovetero. One of the new twists was the sudden spotlight on her. Wallace had a whole little spiel about the importance of the UIS and the neutral observer in acknowledging the legitimacy of their proceedings against Clarke Griffin.

Which wasn’t how it worked, Raven knew, the relevant passages of the protocols flashing before her mind’s eye. The observer simply observed. Sanction was not offered. They could, and had, observed completely illegal proceedings in the past, as they would again in the future.

This one, as far as Raven could determine, occupied a hazy middle ground. Basically, if the Queen of Azgeda agreed it was legitimate, it was. If she did not, then as the landlord (and chief creditor) of this planet, only leased and not sold to the Montoveterians, the Queen could respond in whatever way pleased her most.

Raven nodded gravely for the camera, privately glad that she had not fallen for the heavily studded and zippered black pleather jacket at the shopping arcade on Huronpoint Hub, and had chosen the simple red one instead. It looked much better on the screen. And made her easy to find in the image. In case anyone out there was looking specifically for her. Which he damn well better be by now, she thought, embracing anger to hold panic at bay.

Clarke still refused to respond to the charges. The shock lashing was increased to eleven blows.

The fair skin of her back was already mottled with deep red and purple bruises from the day before. Each new blow had to hurt even more than the last. Clarke had given up not screaming.

Raven didn’t look away.

When she visited Clarke in the medical clinic afterward, she just sat by her bed and held her hand for as long as they allowed her to remain.

Finn was almost hopping in fury when he took her to her quarters afterward. “How can she just not respond!” he howled. “They’re going to kill her slowly like this!”

“I thought this is what you wanted?” Raven said, “for her to be punished for her crimes?”

“I wanted her to stand trial. I wanted to hear her defend herself, defend the unthinkable, defend her people,” Finn dropped onto one of the cheap, unyielding sofas in her guest quarters, his head in his hands. “I wanted every crime answered for, by her.”

“I don’t think that is something you have a right to,” Raven said. “You can give her the opportunity. She doesn’t have to take it.”

“This is…” Finn stumbled. “This is wrong. I can’t figure out how to say it, but this is wrong.”

“Montovetero as they knew it and loved it was destroyed. You said it yourself. The Arcadians offered no quarter and no mercy. Perhaps they do need to be called to account.”

“But through one person? Who wasn’t even a general or an admiral or a politician? Who just happened to end up in a place where in the absence of anyone else, the decision fell to her?”

“They can’t touch anyone else. She’s all they’ve got.”

“So why is she doing this?”

“I don’t know her well, we met a only few weeks ago. But…” Raven trailed off.

She had wrestled with this one all the night through. Sure, yes, Clarke was stalling, trying to give Arcadia and Azgeda, to give Bellamy Blake and Roan kom Nia, the time they needed to mobilize a response. She was also trying to avoid a summary execution. But it was more.

“I think,” Raven sighed finally, “she believes that this is penance.”

The third performance (day twelve, twelve to thirty-six percent total loss of nerves in her leg, tick, tick, tick) was still harder to bear.

The Chief Judge, clearly exasperated beyond measure at Clarke’s refusal to cooperate, suddenly upped the lash count to eighteen. Clarke, through some sort of super-human strength of will did not pass out. The crowd worked themselves into a frenzy as the total approached. Their yells and cheers turned Raven’s blood to ice.

Afterward the crowd inside spilled out into the streets, joining the thousands more milling around and watching on the public screens that were now set up throughout the city. They kicked off a raucous celebration that turned, via mobs and alcohol and roiling emotions, into a riot by the end of the night.

Raven didn’t learn about that until the next morning, however. She’d demanded, and been granted, the right to stay with Clarke the whole night. She could not treat her wounds, but she could sit by Clarke’s bed and stroke her hair while tears slipped out and down both their cheeks.

The fourth day (day thirteen, thirteen to thirty-nine percent irrecoverable loss of mobility, ticktickticktick) dawned overcast and cooler, and as Finn drove her through the streets Raven could see the smashed shop windows and flipped vehicles and litter that was still being swept away.

Raven wasn’t sure Clarke would be able to stay conscious today. She didn’t know how the crowd, or the court, would react to that.

They were settled in their usual seats, Finn beside her and to his left his wife, Keenan. A slim, fair young woman in a bulky sweater with serious eyes and nervous fingers, she wouldn’t look Raven in the face. Raven hadn’t bothered to ask, but she assumed that Finn brought her with them because he was worried about what was going to happen after Clarke refused, again, to answer the charges Yay or Nay.

Wallace was on the stage, deep into his story of Montovetero’s beneficent creation of the galaxy, when he broke off suddenly after a uniformed soldier started waving to get his attention.

They conferred quietly while the crowd strained in excitement over this change-up in the story line.

Wallace returned to center stage, practically swollen with excitement about something. He gestured to the screen above and behind him, “It seems, good people of Monotvetero, that we have another defendant to bring forward.”

The vid behind the judges had switched to a view of the large open area outside the auditorium, which was little more than the exposed hard-packed, rocky red dirt of Najemo. A familiar prowler with a banged up starboard side was just setting down. Raven’s heart started thudding so hard in her chest she wondered if Finn would be able to actually see it.

“As you know, Clarke Griffin is not the only Arcadian war criminal we seek to bring to justice!” Wallace was practically crowing now. “Roan kom Nia, of House Azgeda, is bringing us another.”

The outer door of the prowler opened. A disheveled dark-haired man, head bowed, his hair falling into his face, his bound hands clasped behind his head, was forced out at rifle point. His clothes, a stretched and faded taupe tee shirt and fatigues that might once have been a deep navy blue, offered no clue to his identity.

The rifle was in the hands of Roan kom Nia. He was still wearing what looked to Raven like the black fatigues from Tondisi, though he had changed the black tee shirt for a deep-blue one and accessorized with some of the armor she had fixed in her shop on Mecha what seemed like a million years ago. He was wearing the vest, and, she thought, the lower leg pieces, though the images were blurry and confused. Or maybe that was just the tears of relief welling traitorously in her eyes before she could blink them away.

Once the two figures were clear of the ship they halted, and Roan forced the man to his knees, and pulled his head back to show the hovering cameras his face.

Wallace, nearly cackling with glee, announced, over the thrilled gasps of the crowd, “He brings us Bellamy Blake, Butcher of Semet Province.”

Chapter Text

Like everyone else inside the auditorium, Raven spun in her seat to face the rear doors, straining to see through the crowd as Roan and Bellamy were escorted in.

But when she turned, the first face she saw, only two rows behind her, was John Murphy’s. He raised his finger to his lips, then turned to watch the entrance.

Raven told herself that she would stay cool and calm. She’d been through so much already. She’d been fucking expecting rescue. Depending on it! She was not going to hyperventilate and pass out now that it had arrived.

“Raven?” Finn whispered, “Are you okay?”

Raven jerked back to face him. “No! I mean, yes. I’m fine. Just. This is very unexpected!”

“Yeah, no shit!” Finn started to whisper but had to speak loudly now to be heard over the growing din of the crowd as Roan and Bellamy were led in, accompanied by a rising wave of cheering and booing all at once. With his head close to her ear so she could hear him over the din, he asked, “Is that the same hunter guy who showed up at Mecha Station years ago? The one you….” he trailed off in the face of her raised brow, “picked up at the bar?” he finished weakly.

“Have you not been paying attention to intersystem news at all?” she asked him, shifting her eyes back and forth between Murphy and Roan, and trying to spot any other familiar faces in the crowd.

“Been busy!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. It’s the same guy. Turns out he was the ‘missing’ Azgeda heir all along.”

“I didn’t even know their heir was missing!”

“Yeah. Me neither. Not like I ever gave much of a shit about Azgeda politics,” she agreed. Not until two weeks ago, or slightly less. Twelve days. Twelve days ago Azgeda fucking politics had become one of the most significant things in the galaxy as far as she was concerned. It wasn’t Roan’s fault, exactly, that she had started to fall a little teeny bit in love with him before she knew that would come with the territory. But damn him anyway, she thought. It wasn’t fair.

And then there he was, almost level with her as they walked down the center isle. Roan’s searching eyes met hers and she felt the reassuring smile he didn’t actually change his expression to offer her. How did he do that?

He must have known where to look for her.

Obviously! She scolded herself. Murphy was close to her! Duh! They had, he had, someone had seen her on the video. Wearing her bright red pleather jacket. Totally worth whatever ridiculous price Roan had paid for it just because she liked it.

Thinking of Murphy made her look for him again. Their eyes met briefly, and she saw him mouth, ‘soon.’

She swiveled back to face the stage, gripping her crutch so tightly that her knuckles almost hurt.

A handful of Montoveterian soldiers had gathered between Clarke and the rest of the auditorium, blocking her from view. She’d been once again standing alone at the podium facing the judges, though like everyone else she’d turned to watch the new arrivals.

The soldiers raised their weapons, pointing them at both of the men coming down the aisle. Roan and Bellamy slowed to a halt just beyond the front row of seating, leaving a broad open area between themselves and the stage. Their escorts turned on them, raising their weapons as well. Then one of them gestured at Bellamy, urging him down to his knees again, and then turning to Roan, gestured to the soldier next to him, who was holding out his hands. With a quick shrug, Roan handed over his riffle. And, after more rifle gesturing and a muttered command, the handguns holstered on his thighs. Then he held up his hands, showing them to be empty and looked expectantly at Cage Wallace who had come down to the front of the stage.

“Signor kom Nia,” said Wallace, his expression suggesting that he believed he was sitting on top of the largest, most awesome pile of wealth anyone in the galaxy had ever collected. “I never expected to see you here, visiting us.”

They made quite the picture, Raven thought. Wallace, standing so square and tall in the center of the stage, in his shiny suit and glossy shoes and poufy hair, gazing down at the interloper. While Roan, in fatigues and body armor, disarmed, his longer hair pulled sharply back from his face, stood slouching informally with one hip canted like he was going to turn and wander away whenever he got bored.

“Cage,” Roan said with a casual nod, dropping his hands at the same time. “Been a long time.”

Wallace’s smile froze for a fraction of a second, but left Raven with the distinct impression that Roan’s familiarity was not at all what he had been expecting. Or desired.

And of course Roan knew him. Elite sons-of-bitches always knew each other. Systems hardly mattered in the end. It was how they kept everyone else down. Basic truism for life on any independent station, just acted out, right here, right now, live and in the flesh. On the off chance that Raven had already forgotten what she knew ten seconds ago, which was that her new boyfriend was one the most important people in the whole of the goddamned galaxy.

“Yes. It certainly has,” Wallace replied. “More than six years, I think.”

Roan actually smiled kindly at this feeble attempt at a hit. “Yes. Seven years ago. In Sanaero. Back when it belonged to your father.”

This time Wallace’s flinch was more visible, and the anger in his eyes more obvious to everyone watching.

“And so you’ve brought us Butcher Blake. Why?”

“To collect the reward, of course. Sons who’ve lost their inheritances have to take what they can get, after all. Am I right?”

Raven couldn’t believe this exchange. “Holy shit! Tone it down, Captain Asshole!” she thought hard at Roan’s profile, attempting fruitlessly to communicate a telepathic warning that baiting Cage Wallace was a dangerous fucking game to be playing right now, while he held all the guns. That maybe today was not the day for Roan to give in to his inner mouthy bitch.

Cage Wallace’s smile could have killed Roan where he stood, if he’d had lasers instead of normal human eyes.

He didn’t of course, so instead he folded his arms and said, “Ah, yes. The reward. How far we have sunk below our parents’ hopes and dreams.”

Roan looked as though he was trying not to laugh. “Shall I wait here?” he said. Like he wasn’t the one disarmed and surrounded by hostile soldiers. Like he was the one who was in charge.

Wallace’s faux-smile made him look like he’d eaten the nastiest, most sour piece of candy in the bowl. “Have a seat over there,” he jerked his head toward Raven. “With our esteemed UIS representative. You can observe the proceedings with her. We’ll deal with your payment later.”

“I’d really be more comfortable dealing with it now.”

A flick from Wallace’s fingers and the soldiers all raised their weapons again, pointed straight at Roan. Roan lifted his own hands, palms out and away from his body in a calming gesture. “Afterwards, then,” he said with a small courtly head bow. Then he swaggered toward Raven, taking a seat that had rapidly emptied for him on the other side of Keenan.

He flicked his eyes across Raven before he sat down, but conveyed nothing more than his full awareness of where she was in relation to everything else.

Wallace meanwhile was working to get the attention of the crowd back where it belonged. On him.

“People of Montovetero!” he said, his voice booming across the audience, and across the galaxy to whoever was watching the broadcast. He’d finally been able to get rid of the handheld microphone. As the days had gone on, the production crew had festooned the stage with so many voice pick-ups that they could damn near project the sound of a pen falling to the floor.

“It seems we have another defendant to add to the dock. One who was complicit in many of the same crimes as Clarke Griffin, as well as guilty of many terrible atrocities on his own account. As it happens, we have the list of charges ready. In case any particularly audacious bounty hunter was able to bring Bellamy Blake, the Butcher of Semet Provence, to justice.”

Whoever was managing the projection in the video control room chose this moment to put up a split screen showing a live feed of both men. On the left, Roan smirked obligingly for the camera, producing a lazy wink as he sprawled his seat, knees spread and taking up so much space that his neighbors had been forced to make themselves small.

Raven knew she had no way to be sure, but in her heart she believed. He’d winked at her. Out of all the people in the theater and all the people who would see this later, the only person he was concerned with in that second was her. Cocky, smug bastard. She lifted her hand to cover her mouth, so no one could see her smirking back up at the screen.

On the right, the frame homed in on Bellamy, still on his knees. He looked straight up into the camera hanging nearly above him, and glared directly into the eyes of the audience watching from the auditorium, and from around the galaxy. With his back faintly arched as he looked toward the ceiling, and with his hands still behind his head, Raven’s irrelevant and ridiculous impression was that he could have been posing for a perfume advertisement. Or a beach resort brochure.

The short sleeves of his tee shirt were pulled back to reveal his surprisingly massive upper arms, the soft old fabric clinging to his chest and his shoulders and then hanging down loosely, illustrating as easily as no shirt at all that his stomach was flat as a board. His dark curls, freed from the discipline he usually subjected them to, fell softly across his forehead, framing his large, dark eyes. All they needed was a wind machine and a better background.

Until you saw, really saw, his face. Which was set in an expression of fury and contempt, promises of retribution in his hard eyes matching the defiant line of his mouth and the arrogant thrust of his jaw.

And then his face changed, he dropped his chin and refocused on something in front of him. His expression softened, his eyes lit up, and he nodded once, and smiled, and in that moment Raven saw that he was beautiful.

Like everyone else in the auditorium, Raven jerked her eyes downward from the large screen to see that Clarke Griffin had wormed her way between the soldiers who had been shielding her from the newcomers. She was standing on the lip of the stage, looking at Bellamy like she’d just found whatever salvation she expected from the universe.

They were in the middle of an auditorium surrounded by thousands of people who were screaming for their death, in the middle of city waiting to celebrate their public executions, all while being filmed by cameras that were sending their images out across the galaxy, and Raven realized in that moment, that they were completely alone with one another.

The screen suddenly went dark, and the house lights plunged out, leaving a single spot on Wallace.

“General Emerson,” Wallace called out. “If you would, please.” And then at the last minute Wallace seemed to remember that this was a formal court hearing, despite all the theatrics he was stage managing. He turned to the chief judge, saying, “Assuming your honor approves, of course.”

Her honor, lit again by her cool blue light, did not approve. “Are you finished with your opening statement Minister Wallace?” she asked, her sleek, dark blond head cocked to one side while she raised a fine, firmly drawn eyebrow.

“Yes. I am.”

“Then let the court hear the charges against Clarke Griffin. Again.” She glanced over to the man standing still to attention on the other side of the stage. “General Emerson?”

Emerson, as he had done each day, read the full list of charges against Clarke.

When he finished, the Chief Judge looked down at Clarke, now lit by her own spot. “Clarke Griffin, how say you?”

Clarke, as she had done each day so far, folded her hands before her on the podium and raised her chin.

“Answer the charges, Clarke,” the deep, loud voice of Bellamy Blake broke the pattern. He was still on his knees in the center aisle in front the stage, just outside the light. But Wallace’s vanity-satisfying microphones picked up every word.

Clarke whirled to face him, shock and then understanding lighting her eyes. She nodded, and turned back. Her voice was clear and strong. “I say nay, your honor. I fought for my family, my friends and for my people. What I did served greater ends than mine. I am not guilty of any crimes.”

The crowd howled and booed in thrilled outrage.

The house went dark again.

When the spotlight came back up on Wallace, his smile was triumphant. He spoke to the soldiers hidden in the dark, “Bring the Butcher to the podium.”

With spotlights picking them out for audiences here and at home, the soldiers jerked Bellamy to his feet and hustled him up the steps at the side of the stage. When he tripped and stumbled, the crowded roared with glee. Once he was at the podium they spun him to face the judges and, finally, cut the ties on his wrists and allowed him to drop his arms.

Bellamy shrugged his shoulders, shaking out his hands and vigorously rubbing his wrists.

The officer in charge had placed Bellamy about a pace apart from Clarke, but Raven knew it didn’t matter. The connection between them was perfectly visible to everyone watching.

“General Emerson,” said the Chief Judge, “Please present the charges against Bellamy Blake, Butcher of Semet Province.”

As Emerson began to read a new list of charges, beside her, Finn cleared his throat. Raven turned to look at him and nearly jumped out of her skin. It was Roan. He’d used the blackouts to exchange seats. She caught sight of Finn, who was forward, half-turned in his seat, plainly trying to catch her eye. Even in the dim light she could read his expression which communicated more clearly than any words, “What the Fuck, Raven?!”

“Eyes front, Reyes,” Roan’s low voice brushed against her ear.

She snapped her eyes forward to the stage.

In the gloom, he leaned just close enough that she could feel his shoulder against her own. “How’s your mobility?”

“Same. Bad.”

“Worse?”

“No.” Then she realized this was a stupid moment for pride. “Yes. Worse.”

“Get to the prowler, get it ready for lift off. It’s Murphy’s job to get you there.”

“You?”

“I’ll be with Clarke and Bellamy. Wait until you get my signal and then take off.”

She felt his fingers take her own, and she gripped tightly, the only way she had to tell him just how fucking glad she was that he was here. He returned the pressure, then pressed a small device into her hand and pulled away. “Soon. Be ready.”

He didn’t say anything else, and he kept his hands to himself, but their feet were pressed close together and that was enough. She tucked the device into an inside pocket of her jacket. She’d look at it later, when she had light.

Throughout all of this, General Emerson was still reading the list of formal charges. As with Clarke, they’d apparently turned every single recorded military action that Bellamy Blake had ever even been thought to be a part of into a criminal complaint. Unlike Clarke’s, his list did not end with the surrender. He had played a very active role in leading the teams that had cleared Montovetero. And every neighborhood, every street, every town, every factory, every village got it’s due from Wallace.

Finally, Emerson reached the last charge. Semet Province. The simple language of the complaint laid out clearly what even Raven had been vaguely aware of at the time. Bellamy, Captain Blake by then, though of course she’d had no idea who he was and wouldn’t have cared, had been in charge of clearing Semet Province.

It was a rich agricultural sector far from the capital city of Sanaero, one of the very last provinces still held by Montoveterians, nearly the last to have escaped deportation. The people there had had plenty of time to dig in, and no attack or stratagem had been able to dislodge them. They had fought back with everything they had, from knives and guns to land mines and poison gas.

So Blake burned them out. Literally. His marines came in with helicopters and flamethrowers and firebombs and in two terrible days they burned every square foot of the province, starting at the borders and working their way toward the center, forcing resisters into whatever shelter they could find or make. But nothing the defenders had prepared could withstand the assault. The Arcadian Marines had targeted every house, every barracks, every pillbox, every redoubt, every tunnel and cave.

After the first day, the marines also shot every single person who tried to flee across the lines. They accepted no more surrenders. Not even from children. And they burned their way into the center, until it was all ash. Every square inch.

Raven thought she was ready to hear how bad it had been. After three and half days of Wallace’s performance, each of which had dwelt briefly on the horrors of Semet Province, she thought she understood.

She really, really hadn’t. At least twenty thousand people had died in the final twenty-four hours of the assault on Semet. Burned alive.

“How say you, Bellamy Blake?” asked the chief judge, once Emerson finally fell silent.

Bellamy’s expression of naked contempt, caught by the camera and projected for all to see, was matched by the raw anger in his voice as he declared, “I say you have no right to judge me. I say that this court has no authority over me, in law or in any other realm that I or the people of the Republic of Arcadia are bound to respect.”

Bellamy turned to face the audience now. “Shall I tell you what it was like, growing up under the interdiction and embargos your Oligarchs imposed on us?”

His face and voice were riveting, impassioned, furious, pleading. Raven couldn’t have looked away even if she’d wanted to. How could he ever explain or defend what he had done? How could he even think that was possible?

“Our system has plenty of breathable air, and is rich in ore and minerals, but has very little water. So we can’t grow enough food to feed ourselves. We have to import it, paid for with the goods we build in our factories, from ores we rip from the ground ourselves. But your Oligarchs impounded our shipments of food and water. They said it was because we would not pay the tariffs they demanded.”

“We couldn’t pay the tariffs they demanded, not and still purchase what we needed to survive. But with our food and water denied us, our people suffered. We’d been dying slowly for more than a generation. Starved by choice, by your government. By you.”

Raven finally wrenched her gaze away from Bellamy to see how the crowd was reacting. They were silent, their expressions grim and unyielding and bitter. They didn't care about tariffs or trade. Or boring old complaints about starvation.

The Chief Judge banged her gavel impatiently. “Bellamy Blake, you may present your defense at a later date!”

Bellamy ignored her, raising his voice over hers. “My mother became pregnant a second time when I was five. She chose to bring my sister into the world, but our family rations did not increase. Could not increase. There was no more food or water to be had and our laws mandated only one child. After her partner died in the mines, our family rations were cut. We only had enough for two. So my mother quit eating that her children would survive.”

“Have you ever watched someone starve themselves, slowly, over time, to save your life?”

The crowd had no answer for this. Raven had no answer. Her own mother had died before her eyes, but not out of any sense of self-sacrifice. Not because there was no other way to save the life of her own child. Raven had watched her fail with fury, little grief, and no guilt at all.

The man on the stage was nearly shaking with grief and guilt, and his rage was directed outward. At those who imposed a fate the child he had been could not stop.

“I have. It took her five years for her to die.”

A heckler braver than the rest called out, “Should’ve let you die, you bastard!”

Bellamy ignored him. Cage Wallace, standing by the side of the stage, his arms folded across his chest just watched, his glance shifting back and forth between Bellamy and the uneasy, angry crowd. Raven realized that he couldn’t stop this, not and save face in front of the galaxy. He’d wanted them to watch. And now Bellamy was putting on a show.

Bellamy took another step closer to the edge of the stage. “My mother wasn’t alone in her sacrifice. People who were no longer physically able to work in the factories, to labor in the mines, committed suicide, one by one, so as to decrease the burden on the rest of us. But without them, the living had to work harder and faster and longer, because we couldn’t afford to produce any less.”

“Then, eight years ago, a flu pandemic hit our system. Your Oligarchs refused to let through any antibiotics or vaccines beyond the already negotiated allotment. It wasn’t enough. Hundreds of millions of people were falling ill, weakened already by starvation. So they offered us all that we would need. But only if we finally agreed to give up our independence. Only if we agreed to rejoin Montovetero as a province, and one already deeply indebted to them. Debts that, as they counted them, would have taken generations to pay off.”

Raven could feel the tension in the audience growing. They had to have known how bad it had been inside the Arcadian Republic. Even as a self-absorbed high school student, Raven had known. Relief charities from as far away as Mecha Station had actually collected for the victims of the Arcadian flu pandemic. But when she looked around her all she saw were the survivors of Montovetero shaking their heads, rejecting Bellamy’s words, closing their ears to things they wanted to forget.

“We were so desperate we actually held a vote. Asked our people to decide. Every person over the age of sixteen was consulted. Poll workers visited every home, every hospital. The result was overwhelming. We refused to trade our lives for serfdom by another name.”

And there it was. In Blake’s square shoulders, in his chiseled jaw, in his flashing eyes. In the wounded snarl of his voice. The proud defiance that had marked Arcadia and its people. That had left so many in the rest of the galaxy shaking their heads. Tut-tutting over the Arcadians refusal of the Oligarchs’ offers of generous aid. Washing their hands of the problems of a starving, dying people far away and out of sight, too stubborn to take the help that was offered just because the terms were bad.

“One hundred and seventy-five million of my people died.” Bellamy’s voice actually cracked, and his throat worked as he swallowed back, for how many countless times, a lifetime of grief and rage.

“After it was over? You and your Oligarchs decreased the amount of food allowed into our system. They said we no longer needed it.”

“You mourn fifteen million deaths on Montovetero during and after the war?”

“That is a drop in the bucket to what we have lost because of you.”

“So I reject your charges. I committed no crimes. I fought in the war to win our freedom. To take from you the power that you abused and to claim it for ourselves. I killed your soldiers, and then your people when they refused to concede their defeat. By the dozen, and then the hundred, and finally by the thousands. And I burned Semet Province to the ground. And I would do it again if that’s what it took to make my people free and safe at last.”

Raven wanted to leap to her feet and applaud the performance.

She would have been the only one.

The rest of the audience was rooted in their seats, fixed and immobile as they stared into the face of a man who survived horrors they had denied were even happening. Still denied had ever happened.

Then the silence that had fallen over the auditorium was ripped apart by the hissing scream of sudden rocket fire, just before it hit the metal roof and exploded with a thunderous boom. In the same instant, the doors of the auditorium were jerked open and armed figures with turbans and scarves masking their faces rushed in.

Roan was out of his seat and running for the stage with the first scream. He tore the gun from the first Montoveterian soldier who attempted to block his path and used it to kill him, and then the rest of the squad that had escorted him in, rapidly shooting each one in the head from close range, blood and brain matter flying. While Raven watched in frozen shock, he bent and scooped another rifle from the hands of dead soldiers. As he stood up, another of Wallace’s troops got off a shot that hit Roan square in the chest. Roan staggered back a step, but his armor effortlessly deflected the blast. Roan fired back, knocking the soldier to the ground with a hit to the leg, spun and tossed the extra gun up to Bellamy before vaulting one-armed up onto the stage and rolling to his feet to stand beside him and Clarke.

While Roan was charging the stage, two more figures rose from the audience, from where they’d been salted into the first rows on either side of the aisle. They leapt up and literally ran across the shoulders and seat backs of the people sitting the few rows front of them, landed on the ground with easy rolls and came up with more weapons in their hands, weapons taken from the lifeless hands of the soldiers Roan had killed, weapons they pointed and fired at the next wave of Montoveterian soldiers rushing the stage from the wings.

And then as if a barrier had broken, so many people rushed the stage all at once, more uniformed Montoveterian soldiers, the new invaders in turbans and scarves and loose tunics, and random members of the crowd, that Raven lost track of everyone in the moving mass.

The din was almost unbearable, people screaming and yelling, the rumble of more rocket fire hitting targets outside, the crack of automatic weapons fire inside the auditorium. Raven wanted to cower in her seat and duck her head to get away from it all.

Then she heard her name.

“Reyes!”

Homing on the voice, she realized it was Murphy. He was on his feet, trapped by panicked people too jammed in to move in either direction.

“Stay there!” He yelled, and then he drew back his fist and punched the woman to his left, elbowed the man to his right then placed his hands on the seatback in front of him and vaulted over, slamming his feet into the chest of the man who’d turned to him in surprise. With another quick leap Murphy came over the seat Roan had occupied until moments before, landed on his feet and caught Raven’s elbow.

“Exit ahead,” he gestured with his chin as he pulled an expandable baton from his pocket, opened it with a quick wrist flick and began clubbing people out of the way, beating a path for them.

“Finn!” Raven cried, turning to look over her shoulder, “Finn! Follow us!”

Finn had his arms around Keenan and was trying to steer her toward the center aisle, but at Raven’s voice he turned and nodded, pulling Keenan around with him.

And then the jostling and the crowds nearly tore Murphy away from her, and Raven focused on helping him push through the crowd. Her crutch, she discovered, was an excellent prod.

Somehow they made it through the exit doors and into a crowded passageway beyond, rushing along now with the crowd that pressed so hard that people were losing their footing, falling and being trampled underfoot.

Raven would have fallen too, without Murphy’s fierce grip on her arm, hauling her through the mass.

Once they emerged from the outer doors and into the open area around the side of auditorium building, there was more space to run, but the rockets were louder, the explosions closer, and the gunfire more constant.

Suddenly one of the turbaned figures appeared before them. The fighter’s face-covering scarf was fluttering in the breeze, exposing a wide forehead and large bulging, yellow cat eyes, tapering a fantastically narrow jaw, a face that left no room for any other possibility. The turbaned fighter was a human mutant.

“My name is Una, Lieutenant. This way.” She, for Raven thought her voice and name marked her as a woman, turned and caught Raven’s other arm with long, thin, fantastically strong fingers. Between them Una and Murphy half-towed, half-carried Raven towards the front of the building.

“Finn!” Raven bellowed over her shoulder, trying to find him in the crowd. “Finn! This way!”

The prowler was visible now, ringed with more turbaned fighters, facing outwards. Protecting it. In the strong daylight it was more obvious that they were all mutants, their various sizes and shapes well beyond the conventional human norm, taller, lumpier, shorter, at least two had extra limbs, and Raven was almost positive one had an actual beak. And now that she knew it wasn’t random, that it was deliberate, the signs of genetic manipulation were impossible not to see. It was too extreme, too strange, too far outside the range of possibility.

The audiences pouring out of the front of the auditorium were running in every direction, but some had obviously already tried to rush the prowler, and a pile of bodies was growing as the ring of defenders fired into the crowds.

The ring opened for them as Una and Murphy drew near, and Raven looked again for Finn and Keenan, but she couldn’t find them, hadn’t seen them since they were all still inside the building.

Una dropped her arm once they were inside the ring, turning to fire outward. Raven grabbed for Murphy, screaming, “Where are Roan and Bellamy? Are they coming here?”

“If they can,” he was still dragging her around to the door. “Otherwise they’ll make for the other ships. Check your beacon!”

Raven pulled back, screaming, “What other ships?”

“How do you think the mutants got here?” Murphy yelled. “Come on! I am not facing your boyfriend without you!”

Then there was a noise louder than all the rest as a rocket landed with a scream and boom in the open area between the prowler and the auditorium. The impact threw Raven and Murphy to the ground. When they scrambled to their feet, dazed and shaking their heads, Raven saw that a small impact crater had appeared and more bodies were strewn everywhere, including some of their mutant allies.

But it pushed the crowds back and away, and then she finally saw Finn and Keenan running towards her, but before she could scream or shout or move one of the turbaned defenders swung their weapon and cut them down, blood flying in the air as they fell.

The scream that ripped from Raven’s throat left her breathless and weeping and Murphy gave up on her arm and lifted her bodily, carrying her and her crutch the last of the distance to the door of the prowler. He dropped her to her feet and screamed in her face, “Open the fucking door!”

When she didn’t move, couldn’t move, couldn’t tear her eyes away from Finn’s body, sightless eyes staring up at the sky, Murphy hauled her around, flipped the security hatch and grabbed her hands and placed them on the locks himself. As soon as the door popped open, he spun her roughly back to face him and bellowed, “You start this fucking ship yourself or I will go pound on every goddamned button I see until something happens!”

Raven gulped and nodded, her vision blurry with tears. They still had to leave, she still had to get the ship ready, and she needed her goddamned crutch and where the hell was it?

Murphy must have realized it at the same time she did, and moved faster, handing it to her and then pushing her toward the entrance. “Go! Go! Go!”

Raven went, stumbling down the corridor, barely able to breathe through the sobs that clogged her nose and throat, tumbling through the main cabin and collapsing into the pilot’s chair.

She ran through the pre-fight check by feel and habit, brought the engines online, and realized that no one had followed her on board. “Murphy! Murphy?!” she yelled, repeating his name as loudly as she could, trying ineffectually to dry her face on her sleeves, checking over her shoulder as she worked the controls, but there was no one coming.

Grabbing for her crutch, she rushed as quickly as she could for the door, the noise of gun and mortar fire even louder now than it had been before. She peered around the open frame and realized that Montoveterian troops had arrived, and were advancing on the mutant guards. Murphy had found a gun and was standing with the defenders, firing into the oncoming forces.

She still hadn’t seen Roan, or Bellamy, or Clarke, or the two other marines who’d joined them.

And then she did. They emerged at a run from around the corner of the auditorium building, surrounded by another half dozen turbaned mutant soldiers. Roan and the marines firing until their weapons emptied. Roan was in the front and she saw him reverse his rifle to club a Montoveterian down, then ripped the soldiers weapon from his hands as he fell. Bellamy was running with his arm around Clarke’s waist, helping her move as she clutched her hand to her side, the blood visible even from the distance of the prowler. The two marines, men Raven recognized from Tondisi, followed from behind, working with the other soldiers, keeping up a barrage of fire behind them.

Murphy must have seen them at the same instant because he bellowed something that Raven couldn’t make out, but the turbaned defenders obviously could. They drew closer to him while at the same time they pushed out, making a path for Roan and the rest.

The Montoveterian soldiers rushed in even closer. Hand-to-hand fighting was breaking out as Bellamy and Roan reached the edge of the rapidly shredding protective circle. Roan looked up and met her eyes, waving and yelling, and while she couldn’t hear his words she knew he was telling her to get inside.

Raven turned and moved as quickly as she could, looking back only when she heard footsteps behind her. When she saw it was Murphy and Una and a few others she kept moving. She was almost through the main cabin when she heard Roan’s voice, “Get us flying!”

She whirled and saw him turn and dodge back for the door, making room for Bellamy and Clarke to stagger in, surrounded by still more turbaned fighters. Relief warred with fresh adrenaline, making her feel almost nauseated, and she lunged as quickly as she could for the pilot’s chair. Muttering aloud that if Roan wasn’t still on board she would kill him herself, she brought the downward thrusters on at full as she fell into her seat, and with a jerk, the prowler rose into the air.

“I’m closing the door!” She yelled into the PA, shut her eyes briefly, and banged the switch.

Once the control board flashed that the door was sealed, Raven spun the ship and headed for the empty horizon away from the city, picking up speed and altitude with every second.

The co-pilot chair moved and Roan dropped into it, and Raven took her first deep, shuddering breath since the rocket had hit the roof of the auditorium.

“We’re awfully heavily loaded,” she told him, watching the balance monitors move into the bottom of the red zone. “How many people are onboard?”

“Three dozen? I’m not sure. We took on everyone still standing.”

“It’s going to be harder to break atmosphere, we’ll need a longer run. And we’re listing to port.”

“Okay. I’ll go get them moved around. You keep flying.”

“What am I going to find once we hit space?” she cried at his vanishing back.

“Keep flying,” was his only response.

A few minutes later the ship evened out, and as she was readjusting the trim, she heard Roan come back in and take his seat.

“I didn’t realize you were a pilot, too,” said Cage Wallace. “You are full of surprises, Ms. Reyes.”

Raven whirled to see Wallace sitting back in the copilot chair, a haphazardly wrapped turban slipping off his head, and a hastily donned tunic hiked up around his knees, his shiny grey trousers a strange counterpoint to the rough green fabric of his stolen disguise. He had spun the seat around and was pointing a gun right at her.

“If you’ll just keep flying, please. And once we hit space, we’ll be looking for the Astrid.”

Chapter Text

“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Raven, stealing quick glances away from the front windows and the controls whenever she dared in order to stare incredulously at Cage Wallace, smirking triumphantly in the co-pilot chair. “You snuck on board? Wearing a stolen uniform?”

“Why mess with the classics, I always say,” Wallace replied, sounding drunk on his own cleverness. Because he was a complete jackass, Raven reminded herself. None were such dangerous, venomous jackasses as he.

“You realize there are just under three dozen soldiers out there?” she said, her eyes back on the screens and the horizon in front of her, scooting forward to reach for toggle switch at the upper edge of the console. “Any one of whom would be thrilled to kill you.”

“Not as long as I have a gun on you, Ms. Reyes!” Cage was nearly sing-songing he was so pleased with himself. “They won’t risk your life!”

Raven’s jacket fell open a little further as she hunched around to look at yet another set of readouts. The septic system, as it happened, but she knew there was no way the jackass on her right would know that. Turning her shoulder still further away from him, she peered unseeing at the small screen. Enough to shield her hand as she slipped it into her inner jacket pocket to palm the beacon Roan had given her.

“I saw,” Wallace said.

Raven froze.

“I was watching!” Wallace was nearly chortling, “When it turned out only your hands would unlock this ship.”

Raven relaxed and pulled the beacon out.

Wallace was still talking. Of course he was. Man loved a stage and an audience. Even an audience of one.

“You aren’t just a little nobody from a backwater station, are you, Ms. UIS representative? You’re somebody. Somebody to Roan kom Nia specifically.”

Raven dropped her hand to her waist and rolled the beacon in her palm, searching for any button to depress, shooting Cage another disgusted look over her shoulder, hoping to egg him on.

“So, no!” Wallace declared with a broad smirk, “I don’t think any of them are a danger to me as long as they fear that their actions might put your life at risk.”

“Everyone from my station is a somebody, asshole,” Raven snarled, squeezing the little beacon in her palm and at the same time raising the nose of the prowler more sharply than she should have and watching the red warnings climb. She dropped the nose down to the gentler angle again, sure that the passengers would have felt the surge. “Including my friend Finn Collins,” she added, her breath catching as she said his name.

“Who?” said Wallace, sounding completely baffled. And then he remembered. “Oh, yes. Your friend from your backwater station. The one who ended up with us. For love of one of our own. Very noble.”

“Very dead,” she ground out. She hadn’t thought her hatred for Wallace could possibly get any greater or more complete. She was wrong. Her voice was shaking with it. “You thought you were playing a game. You thought you were still somebody who matters and you’re not. You’re just a fallen nobody, and when you die no one will know or care. Just like the rest of us. Just like Finn and Keenan.”

“You’re taking me to my warship. I’m not going to die today.”

“Yes,” Roan pushed through the door. “You are.”

Wallace smiled lazily, his gun still trained on Raven. “Not while I have your…”

He never finished the sentence.

As Raven turned in relief, Roan crossed the cramped compartment in two quick strides, stooping to sweep up Raven’s crutch as he came. Spinning it up off his fingers as he straightened, he reversed his grip and caught it one-handed, and then he drove the round, rubber-coated tip straight into Wallace’s solar plexus.

Wallace tried to bring his gun to bear as he collapsed around the point of impact, but Roan was already inside the reach of Wallace’s arm. Dropping the crutch, he jammed his knee into Wallace’s belly, and caught his wrist with both hands, twisting and bending it savagely.

Raven heard the crack of bones giving, Wallace's outraged screech of pain, and the clatter of hte gun bouncing off the control panels as it tumbled beneath their feet.

Roan seized the front of Wallace’s stolen tunic, dragged him out of the copilot seat, and threw him onto the floor of the compartment.

Frozen by the sudden explosion of violence, Raven hadn't made a sound.

Wallace tried to roll to get his feet under him, but Roan kicked him in the gut so viciously that Raven actually heard the ‘woosh’ of breath leaving Wallace’s lungs. He collapsed back to the floor, feebly scrabbling to rise. Roan kicked him again, over onto his back this time, dropping to his knees in the same fluid motion, landing on the ground straddling Wallace’s body.

Snatching up the fallen crutch from the floor at his side, Roan swung it around and using both hands, leaned forward, and jammed it sideways into Wallace’s throat, using the weight of his shoulders to crush Wallace’s windpipe. Wallace bucked and thrashed, catching his hands around the crutch, trying in vain to force the rigid bar up and away. His need to breathe gave his struggle a desperate strength. His heels beat a loud tattoo on the hard floor and against the console base, his upper body writhing as he fought for any purchase.

Roan leaned closer and raised his arms slightly to release the pressure on Wallace’s throat, just enough to give himself room to smash the crutch down harder.

Raven heard Wallace’s spinal cord crack with an audible crunch. His body went limp, his restless feet stilled, his hands fell away from the crutch.

After holding the pressure for another long moment, Roan sat back on heels. His shoulders heaving with his heavy breathing, still straddling Wallace’s dead body, still holding the crutch he’d killed him with, he looked up at Raven.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice rough and winded.

“No!” she wailed as quietly as she could, holding onto the remnants of her wits by her fingernails, promising herself she’d have a nice, private breakdown later. “I’m really not okay!”

“Do you need me to take the controls?”

Before she could answer Murphy and Bellamy appeared in the doorway, talking over each other, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

Raven turned to face to the front windows, forced her hands back onto the stick and left it for them sort out. The prowler was still too heavily loaded, breaking the gravity well was going to be harder than it should be, and she decided she would stay focused on that.

She did her best to block out the quick muttered explanations, the grunting and shifting and dragging as they removed Cage Wallace’s body, the door banging open and closed. The sudden silence that followed was almost equally unnerving, but Raven was determined to keep her attention on her duty. Which was to get this fucking ship into space in one piece.

Eventually, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Roan slip into the co-pilot chair, leaning down to fish out Wallace’s gun from underneath the control panels. After checking to make sure the safety was on, he placed it in the empty holster on his right leg.

“Raven?” he repeated very carefully, as he sat up to face her. “Do you need me to take the controls?”

She kept her eyes on the path ahead. “Just tell me where the fuck we’re going. Tell me that there is not a Montoveterian warship out there. That the Astrid isn’t waiting to shoot us out of the black.”

“It shouldn’t be. The Casisto entered the solar system yesterday, drawing the Astrid away in pursuit. That’s how were able to approach and land without incident.”

“So, where are we going?”

“To the closest transit point, where we will wait for Una’s ships to come collect her and her troops. The jump off is between the orbits of the two outer planets on the near edge of this solar system. It’s marked by a small hub station. We'll rendezvous there.”

“Fine.” She glanced down at the nav screen, still mostly full of the bulk of Najemo below them. She saw a motley collection of a half-dozen or so other ships taking off or already flying, running hard for the black, and assumed those must belong to Roan’s unexpected allies. “We have to come around the other side of the planet for that one, and then it should be a mostly straight shot.”

After a longish silence, during which Raven was very, very proud of herself for not turning and screaming every horrible name she’d ever heard in her life at him, because it wasn’t his fault and it wouldn’t be fair, Roan said, even more cautiously, “I heard you tell him Finn was there. And that he died.”

“Yes. Finn. And his wife. Keenan. I told them to follow us. I thought we could give them a way out. I thought I could save them. But Una’s people saw his uniform. They shot them both. Accidental casualties of war.” Her voice was hollow. Waiting for the grief to come again and fill it up.

“Was that him, with you, in the auditorium? The soldier sitting next to you in some of the pictures looked familiar. But I thought I must have been imagining things. That it was a strange coincidence. That there was no rhyme nor reason for him to be there. In a Montovetero uniform and a buzz cut.”

Raven half-laughed, half-sobbed. Poor Finn. It was not what he had deserved. It wasn’t what any of them had deserved. “He was with a terraforming outfit that did some work here. He met a girl. He stayed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How could you have known? Or done anything if you had?”

“If I’d known, I would’ve tried to do something.”

Raven just nodded, blinking rapidly to clear her wet eyes. Of course he thought that. He was Roan kom fucking Nia of House Azgeda and he thought he could do whatever the fuck he pleased. Including kill people with her own damn crutch for having the gall to threaten her.

Frowning down at the controls, willing her hand not to shake, she belatedly remembered to ask, “How’s Clarke?”

“She took a bullet in the side. One of Una’s medics made it onboard and is taking it out now. Clarke will be fine.”

Raven nodded and swallowed hard. “Good,” she said.

He swung forward again and lifted his hands to the controls. “I’m pulling up the long range navigation now, setting the course for the transfer point.”

A minute or two later Raven forced the air out of her lungs with a harsh sigh, and dropped her shoulders. “Okay. Out of atmosphere. Can you take control now?”

“Yes. Switching over 3, 2, 1, now.”

Raven lifted her hands from the stick and dropped them into her lap as she slumped against the seatback.

Now, she told herself. Now she could cry for Finn. Only now her eyes were dry as old bones. She lifted her hands and ground the heels into her eye sockets, trying to work some moisture back. Trying to feel something beyond the queer pain in her heart and the all-too-familiar burning ache in her hip and back.

A faint warning ‘bing’ from the nav screen made her drop her hands to look. They were coming around the far edge of Najemo now, and the scanners had picked up a cluster of smaller ships surrounding a larger one, all approaching from the near edge of the solar system. From the transfer point. The distant group had nearly reached the orbital path of the next closest planet to the one that was now falling rapidly behind them.

“Is that the Astrid?” she asked, dread making the hairs on her neck rise, wondering if Wallace had said ‘ship,’ but meant ‘ships,’ plural.

“No.” Roan altered their course slightly, changing their trajectory so that they would have a better view of the huge ship from the side. “The Astrid is barely a quarter that size.”

He adjusted the view on the nav screen, bringing the small group into greater resolution even as the ships appeared to the unaided eye as distant objects on the far horizon, no larger than pinpricks in the star filled dark ahead of them, standing out because they did not flicker. They reflected.

“Those are ships of the Azgedan Royal Fleet,” he said, looking up from the nav screen, and catching her eyes. “Wallace, or whoever was in charge of their operation to take you and Clarke, ordered the destruction of the two Azgedan scout ships escorting you. That alone requires a response.”

He fell quiet and they turned to watch as the distant dots grew slowly larger. “I admit,” he added after a time, “I wasn’t expecting an entire small battle group.”

“Roan,” Raven said some time later, “what the hell is that?”

The center ship was still thousands and thousands of kilometers distant, but already filled a space larger than her fist, and now was growing rapidly as they closed in on each other.

“That,” he said, once it was close enough for the prowler to put up the ping data in the nav screen, “Is the Command Carrier, ARF Uralze.”

Raven ended up back at the controls while Roan headed for the main cabin to break the news. She wasn’t alone for very long. Clarke came shuffling in, the sleeves of her orange coveralls dragging on the ground as she clutched a handful in the front to keep them from falling off altogether, and wearing a too large borrowed tee shirt. The faded logo of a Mecha Station band on the front clearly marking it as one of Roan’s.

Raven remembered the first time they’d heard that band play. It was one of the first things she and Roan had done together besides drink at the bar and fuck in her apartment. She and he had made a habit of trying to see them after that, when they could. He’d bought the shirt at one of the later concerts, said he’d wanted to support them because he liked their music.

She’d let him buy her one, too. First true gift he’d ever given her. She slept in it still. When she was home. Which she suddenly missed terribly, and then she realized it was the first time she’d felt that way since she'd woken up on the Arcadian Hub station.

“How’s your side?” Raven asked Clarke, shaking herself out of her sudden homesickness. There was a lot of space yet to cross before she would see Mecha again.

“Not so bad. My back is a lot worse than my side, though,” said Clarke, settling gingerly into the co-pilot seat.

“I… You were incredible, you know,” Raven said.

Clarke extended her hand. “You spotted the opportunity. And I couldn’t have done it without knowing you were there. That you would be there.”

Raven felt like those were hardly things to be thanked for. Maybe if she hadn’t seen the Contempt of Court option, they would have found another way. Found something else. Anything else.

She knew, of course, that wasn’t true. She’d read and re-read the court procedures until it felt like her eyes and her brain both were bleeding. They’d done the best they could, and it had barely been good enough. And Clarke had suffered mightily as a result. But Raven put her hand in Clarke’s and squeezed back.

Without letting her go, Clarke nodded at the ship that now filled more than twenty percent of the window. “That’s quite a sight.”

“No shit. I think it might actually be bigger than Mecha, volume-wise.”

“Not quite,” said Roan, moving slowly in to stand just behind Raven, resting his hip against the back of her chair. “It has a crew of about seven thousand. Almost ten times that number live on Mecha. But Mecha is designed to be efficient. This class of carriers was designed to impress.”

“I’m impressed,” Clarke said.

“No, shit,” Raven added, dropping Clarke’s hand. She looked up at Roan, “So where do we go to dock?”

“We don’t dock. It has flight decks. It’s mostly flight decks, in fact. We’ll be flown right inside when the hanger doors open.”

“Be flown?”

“Yes,” he smiled. “No independent maneuvering. Too many things to break.”

“And it can really hold a prowler?”

“Its normal compliment is fourteen prowlers this size, fifty two-man fighters, and sixteen shuttles. Plus the captain’s runabout, which is the largest prowler-class vessel. Those can carry a crew of ten.”

He sounded… proud. “My first active-duty posting once I was commissioned, before I joined the Special Forces, was on the Uralze. Under Captain Torval. He’s a rear-admiral now,” he added, almost as an afterthought. Raven wasn’t even sure to whom he was talking. Maybe to himself. Remembering who he had been.

She looked up and watched him as he watched the oncoming ship slowly fill the window, a faint smile on his lips the whole time.

“So,” she said, calling his attention back to the problem at hand, “what happens when we get there? With all these people?” she waved her hand vaguely toward the main cabin. “And you’re the only Azgedan on board?”

“Well. I’m planning to get off first. Hope they won’t shoot.”

Raven spun her head to look at him, afraid he was serious.

He winked at her.

She rolled her eyes, and huffed under her breath.

Then she saw a light blinking and said, “Are we being hailed?”

“We are.”

Raven reached for her crutch, then snatched her hands back at the last second, remembering Roan using it to crush the life out of Cage Wallace.

Roan saw, and offered her his arm instead. Pulling herself to her feet she nodded her thanks. “I’m off to the head. Before whatever comes next.”

* * * *

From her seat on the bench in the main cabin, Raven felt the wall of the ship behind her back jerk faintly when the Uralze took control. Thirty-odd mutant fighters stood, sat and squatted all around her in the very crowded main cabin, all of them silent and waiting as they were drawn inside the mammoth carrier.

Raven sat silently with them.

Roan appeared, weaving his way carefully through the packed space until he got to her. Crouching down to bring his face level with hers, his hands on her knees for balance, he said quietly, “Can you use your crutch? Or would you prefer a wheelchair?”

When she frowned, he offered, “It’s a really long walk, even with the lifts, between the hanger bay and the bridge.”

“Why am I going to the bridge?”

“Because, Ms. Reyes, your duties as a UIS neutral observer are not yet over.”

Alarm made her sit up straighter. “Why? What’s going to happen?”

He looked up into her face, his eyes very blue in the harsh cabin lighting. “I’m not sure yet, but they’re being very skittish and vague.”

“Okay.” Raven nodded several times, holding onto his steady gaze with hers until her vision filmed with all the overwrought tears she wasn’t letting fall. “You know, any time you want to stop respecting my boundaries, that would be good.”

He half-smiled in relief, dropped forward onto his knees and pulled her against his chest, wrapping her almost too tightly in his arms. She turned into his hug and held on just as fiercely, burying her face in his neck, breathing him in. Taking whatever strength she could from his firm embrace. Eventually, when she couldn’t take the deep breath she needed, she pushed back, straining a little as he only reluctantly let go.

She slid her arms over his shoulders to capture his head in her hands. Leaning forward, almost close enough to brush her forehead against his, and keeping her voice very low, she said, “You put back on your body armor. What are you worried about?”

“Call it a statement of caution.”

After searching his eyes for any sign of secrets kept, she relented. “Okay. Ask for a wheelchair but bring me the crutch. And promise me you’ll wipe it down.”

“I wiped it down.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, sensing appeasement rather than honesty in his too hasty reply. “In a way I actually believe you.”

He met her eyes this time. “I’ll ask Clarke to wipe it down.”

She smiled a little despite herself. “Nice save.” Then she kissed him. Hard. Telling herself that it was definitely not the last time. That he wasn’t going to be sucked back into House Azgeda just as easily and completely as the Uralze had just pulled in the prowler. Or that she’d never be able to see him again once they had him inside. Told herself that the way he kissed her back, all teeth and sweeping tongues, that he way his fingers tightened in her hair and along her jaw, absolutely didn’t mean that he was worried about the same thing.

She was standing with him, balancing herself with a hand on the wall, when he opened the outer door. He stepped out and turned to offer her his arm, steadying her down the short jump to the hanger bay floor. Then she faced forward, her hand still in his arm as they walked to meet their escort.

It was reassuringly less formidable than her half-formed fears. There was no pomp and unnecessary display, only a half-dozen officers, and behind them two low passenger carts with soldiers at the steering controls. The officers and soldiers were all in their regular duty uniforms, simple flight suits in the mottled grey-blues that blended in with ship interiors.

Following them out as they exited the prowler were Bellamy and his three marines. Like Roan, they were still dressed in the same anonymous gear they’d been wearing during the rescue. Clarke trailed after them. She’d long since conquered the challenge of looking like she was dressed for the occasion no matter what she was wearing. Which in this case were still her bloodstained orange prison coveralls, sleeves now secured around her middle so she didn’t keep tripping on them, and Roan’s faded band tee shirt drooping off her shoulders.

With Clarke came Una, the headwoman in command of the company of mutant fighters, the rest of whom had stayed on the prowler for the moment. Una, Raven noticed, had restrung the loose end of her turban across her jaw, slightly disguising the disconcerting peculiarities of her face.

The Lieutenant Commander in charge of the small group of escorts straightened up and saluted smartly as Roan and Raven drew up in front of her. “Major kom Nia,” she said, “Welcome aboard the Uralze.”

Raven glanced wildly at Roan, who met her eyes and implied a surprised shrug with the tilt of his head. Not only had he been stripped of his rank and his commission six years ago, he hadn’t been a major then. He’d still been a captain.

Raising a quizzical brow at the officer, he said, “I don’t believe I hold that rank, Commander…?” he paused, inviting her name.

“Lieutenant Commander Nadia Echo, sir. And I have your paperwork here, sir.” She handed Roan a slim portfolio.

He flipped it open and quickly scanned the page, then handed it to Raven, offering as an explanation, “Ms. Reyes is a neutral observer from the UIS. She has been witness to this event since it began and will continue to observe until it is resolved.”

While Raven balanced awkwardly on her good leg, ignoring the prickling in her hip, and flipped open the portfolio, Roan continued with the introductions.

The only thing inside the portfolio was a single sheet of paper with a short formal letter, decorated with an array of colorful seals and stamps, awarding Roan his new rank and welcoming him back into the Azgedan Special Forces. His mother’s signature filled nearly the bottom quarter of the page.

Raven was utterly unprepared for the wash of anger she felt when she saw Nia’s huge, looping handwriting. By how much she wanted to rip the letter into tiny pieces, toss it to the floor, stomp her foot and bellow out that it wasn’t fair and she wasn’t going to take it.

She’d only just glimpsed pieces of what she might have with him, what they might have together. Now it could all be stripped away by the stroke of a pen. One wielded by a woman who as recently as a month ago Raven had barely even thought of as real. As a human being who walks and eats and fucks and shits as opposed to a flat image on a distant screen.

Meanwhile, Lt. Commander Echo had directed Clarke into one of the passenger carts, one that would to take her to the ship’s medical center. Bellamy ordered one of his marines to accompany Clarke, explaining that she would appreciate the company. This visibly annoyed both Clarke and Commander Echo, but Clarke shrugged, Echo grimaced, and the marine climbed into the cart beside Clarke.

Echo detailed another of the Azgeda officers to Una, explaining that as per Major kom Nia’s request, space had been set aside for her troops to rest and eat while they waited for transport back to their own ships to be arranged. Lieutenant Murphy and the remaining Arcadian Marine stayed with Una, which was very interesting, Raven thought. She wondered whose idea that was.

Then the second cart pulled around and stopped in front of Raven, Roan and Bellamy. The driver had pulled forward enough that the rear facing jump seat was in front of Raven, obviously intended for her. Instead Roan put one hand on the small of Raven’s back and the other under her elbow and directed her to the bench directly behind the driver, and then he walked around the cart and slid into the spot beside Raven. Bellamy hopped into the front passenger seat, leaving the Lieutenant Commander and her remaining assistant to take the back bench.

Once the little vehicle took off on a quiet electric hum, Roan caught Raven’s eye and then opened his hand on the seat between them. She put her hand in his, and told herself she could get through this. They could get through this. Whatever this turned out to be.

This turned out to be a surprisingly long trip to the bridge, down long corridors and up several levels in lifts large enough to accommodate the electric cart. The dimly lit bridge itself, with brightly illuminated workstations and huge windows looking out into the star-filled black looked exactly like Raven thought a carrier ship bridge would look. At least, that was her impression based on full-length action vids and way too many online war games played with other engineering students years ago. She decided that this was somehow even more disconcerting than having it look wildly different might have been.

They followed Echo onto the bridge to meet two officers who were waiting for them, both of them in uniforms adorned with much military insignia, which Raven took to indicate seriously senior rank. The woman, the Captain of the Uralze, was tall and rangy and looked as though she disapproved of whatever was happening. The other officer, even taller, older, and it seemed to Raven, still more senior, had an absolutely astounding beard. It hung in two thick, grey braids to the middle of his chest.

Raven kept trying to look away, but it was the most amazing facial hair she’d ever seen in her life, and she lived on a crappy station at the ass end of nowhere, full of people with, at best, idiosyncratic personal grooming habits.

She’d had to accept her crutch to walk into the bridge itself. Until now so much else demanded her attention that she’d been able to push aside awareness of her hip. But movement had made the dull ache grow sharp again, reminding her that all the running with Murphy hours earlier was going to demand its due.

Through the pain fog in her brain, she also decided there was something different about Roan. In the hanger bay, he had looked out of place in his black fatigues and hard, dull black body armor. But here on the bridge, he no longer did. When he and Bellamy came to a halt in front of the two senior officers, stood to attention and snapped off their salutes, she realized why. His loose swagger was gone, and a lifetime of conditioning had reasserted itself in the same disciplined and controlled posture as every other soldier she’d seen on this or any other military ship. He and Bellamy didn’t even need uniforms. Their bearing alone marked them as belonging, despite their worn fatigues and dirty shirts.

It looked good on him. It also looked alien. She wasn’t sure she liked it at all.

Then the man with the forked beard turned to address her. “Welcome aboard, Ms. Reyes. I haven’t worked with a neutral observer in many years, but in this situation I am very glad to have you here.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, realizing that she must have zoned out because she had no idea if anyone had told her his name.

“I think, Admiral Torval,” Roan interrupted, “Ms. Reyes would do better if she had a place to sit.”

“Of course!” Torval cried, while Raven tried to communicate grateful thanks to Roan via a speaking glance. “My apologies. Ensign!”

A young officer sprang into action and Raven was sinking onto a rolling stool about a second later. The movement shot pain all the way up her left side nearly to her armpit, but once the weight was off, the pain went back to medium-horrible throbbing and Raven looked at the admiral with a little more interest. Torval had been Roan’s first commanding officer, and she’d thought it was pretty clear from the way Roan had said his name that he’d respected and admired him.

Which was not a sentiment she’d heard very often from Roan, she realized. Made her wonder, all of a sudden, how it was that Torval’s fleet just happened to be the one sent out to reel in the Queen’s wandering son.

‘Trap!’ She bit her tongue on her impulse to shout. ‘It’s a trap!’

Roan already knew.

Once the formal introductions were complete, Bellamy asked Torval when they were expecting the Casisto to arrive.

“Indomitable little vessel you have there, Captain!” Torval said, beaming general approval at Bellamy. “Took a bit of a beating but she’s fine. Much better than the Astrid! Limping our way now. Be here in a few hours. I’m sure your XO will be relieved to have you back on board.”

The Astrid, Raven had learned earlier, once Bellamy made contact with Mbege on the Casisto, had been completely destroyed sometime in the middle of Raven’s night. It was now nothing but a floating, blown-out hulk drifting on the far side of the solar system.

“The Astrid!” snorted the Uralze’s captain. “Bastards actually had her flying the Montoveterian colors. Inside Azgeda System!”

The Admiral turned to Roan next and asked for a review of conditions on Najemo. Once Roan had completed an amazingly succinct report, roughly along the lines of ‘we landed, retrieved Ms. Griffin and Ms. Reyes and took off,’ Torval nodded and said, “Thank you, Major. Your recommendations?”

Roan paused for a beat too long, flicking his eyes back and forth between the Captain of the Uralze and Torval, and then he said, “I’m happy to offer my input, of course, sir.”

“I think you have as complete an understanding of the situation at present as anyone else involved, Major,” Torval assured him. “Now that you are returned to active duty, we invite your recommendations as to how we should proceed. Her majesty herself has informed me that she has full confidence in your judgment in this matter.”

Roan stared frozen for another long moment, then began nodding, turning his head away from the admiral to look out of the windows. His lips were pressed flat and his mouth was working the way Raven had noticed before when he was concentrating really hard on some problem he faced. Usually having to do with ship mechanics, in her experience.

Raven wondered if you could actually hear metaphorical traps clang shut.

A moment later she learned that you could.

Roan shrugged his shoulders, forcing out the tension that had driven them upwards and looked at the admiral. His voice was deep and his words carefully articulated. “The insult to Azgeda cannot stand.”

Metaphorical traps were deafening when they closed, she learned.

The sound actually hurt as it echoed through her hollow chest.

Roan was still speaking. “They destroyed two Azgeda scout ships, boarded a private vessel, murdered her owners, and kidnapped her passengers – all inside Azgeda System. And no client should ever feel free to engage in independent intersystem action, particularly not a show trial of another system’s avatar.”

Torval and the ship captain were nodding along in agreement.

“For all this, our response needs to be swift and harsh and final. Their leaders, naturally, will need to be punished for treason against the Queen. Oligarchs, senior government officials, senior military staff, and the judges who presided over their show trial of Clarke Griffin. Death by hanging. But so, too, their populace must also be punished for allowing their leaders to so overreach. I recommend we evict them. Immediately. Revoke the lease to Najemo. Give them notice to clear the planet as promptly as possible, after which forcible removal begins.”

Torval frowned thoughtfully. “In principle, sound. Difficult in practice. Eviction, as the Arcadians have recently demonstrated,” Torval acknowledged Bellamy with a quick nod, “is a complex task.”

Roan shook his head. “Not on this planet. It’s a relatively small settlement and they have to run their oxygenation plants full time to keep everyone breathing. Seize the plants, take them offline and, one way or another, the problem will resolve itself within a few days.”

A silence fell across the little group.

Raven decided that she must be thinking extra slowly because dealing with the pain in her hip was taking so much effort, but surely Roan hadn’t suggested that they simply kill everyone on Najemo who didn’t leave when they told them to. Hadn’t suggested that they turn off their oxygen and let them slowly asphyxiate.

But the way Roan and Torval and the Captain and Bellamy were all staring at one another, eyes grim and jaws firm, eroded her doubts. That was exactly what Roan had just proposed.

“How many people live down there?” she finally asked, breaking the silence.

Roan turned his head towards her, but didn’t meet her eyes. “Just under four million. All that was left of the Montoveterians who still desired to live under the authority of their reconstituted Oligarchs.”

“How long does it take to move that many people?” she gasped.

“I suggest we offer them twelve hours before we take the plants off-line,” Roan said, addressing Torval’s profile as much as he was speaking to her. Which didn’t answer her question at all. “Though,” he added, apparently thinking it through, “perhaps they could buy a little time if they turn their leadership over to us promptly enough.”

“Sir,” another officer appeared at the shoulder of the Uralze’s captain, who turned to confer quietly with her while Roan and Torval continued to stare at each other.

The captain cleared her throat, capturing everyone’s attention, and then she said, “A ship has cleared the surface heading right for the jump-off.”

Torval huffed a faint laugh, full of disgust. “Rats,” he said.

Raven was too tired and too horrified to work it out. “Rats?”

Roan looked directly at her this time. “Fleeing the sinking ship. They’ve spotted the fleet. They expect reprisals. Those who can have started to run.”

“Leaving only the poor bastards who don’t have their own ships to die on the ground when you take away their oxygen?” Raven exclaimed, the terror of the station born and bred at the threat of compromised oxygen crawling up her spine.

“If they choose to leave without offering to help their own people,” Roan said, still watching her, “we don’t have many options. Other than shooting them down, of course. Which,” he added slowly, turning back to Torval, “might be wise. For this first ship. As a message. In case their leaders are trying to escape our judgment.”

In the dim light of the bridge, the strong angles of his face were more sharply drawn than ever, his light eyes more startling in contrast. Raven searched for any signs of self-doubt, any hints that he wasn’t fully confident that this was his call to make. His choice to remove the very air from the lungs of four million people. There were none.

Heat bloomed in her palms and rolled up her arms, slowly filling the void that had opened in her chest. Raven kept her face still with effort, biting back the angry smirk that she knew was trying to steal across her lips. Nia either had no fucking clue what she’d just done, or she did, and she was even tougher than Raven had previously imagined. The Prince was home. Long live the Queen.

Torval was nodding slowly. “I agree. Captain, if you would?” He tilted his head at her. “Offer a warning shot, of course, and allow them to turn back to be searched if they will.”

She nodded. “Yes, sir,” and turned to her bridge crew to give the necessary orders.

Her eyes still on Roan’s profile, Raven swallowed hard.

Roan the hunter. She’d called him that right along with everyone else, laughed at the funny title he’d worn so lightly on Mecha.

Roan the killer. Something nearly everyone thought but almost never said aloud. She’d thought that one too, right along with the rest of them, though she’d never let herself even form the words. Back when he was, as everyone believed in their hearts, killing rival crews who turned to piracy in their spare time, and were so foolhardy as to try jumping him.

No one had been upset. Many were not so very secretly pleased. Felt like they had a special protector. Someone who kept in his heart the interests of the regular folk struggling on the edge. Someone strong enough to eliminate the worst threats in that lawless place. Someone who kept the balance among all the rest more or less at equilibrium.

Like a fucking king.

A king who had killed any number of people with his own hands today, with whatever tools he could find or appropriate, the last one literally at her feet. All to rescue her.

She dropped her eyes.

Into the uncomfortable silence, Bellamy said, “The Oligarchs didn’t help their own on Montovetero either.” He looked at Raven, “Who do you think dug in? It wasn’t the elites, the people with friends or resources or even just skills to sell elsewhere. It was the people who didn’t think they had anywhere else to go, who refused to abandon what they held and believed they’d never be able to replace.”

Raven believed every word. She let all five days of exhausted loathing color her voice. “While assholes like Cage Wallace lived to fight another day?”

Bellamy shrugged. “Yes.”

“Well would you look at that,” the Uralze's Captain exclaimed. “They’re going to try and run for it.”

They all looked at Torval. He looked at Roan.

“Stop them,” said Roan. “Board them if possible, and arrest the Oligarch that is no doubt on board. Destroy them if boarding is impossible. Make sure to record the full encounter.”

Torval nodded, looked to the Captain and said, “If you will, Captain.”

There was another heavy silence as they waited and watched while a dozen two-man fighters and four prowlers launched, an escort for a few of the smaller vessels of the battle group that headed to intercept the small light freighter running for the jump-off.

Torval asked, of no one in particular it seemed to Raven, “Who’s in charge down there now? Is it still Cage Wallace?”

“No. Cage Wallace is dead,” Roan said. Then clearing his throat somewhat awkwardly, he added, “His body is on my ship.”

Torval and the Captain swiveled their heads around to stare at Roan, eyes wide with surprise. Of course, Raven thought to herself, who the fuck wouldn’t be surprised by that little information bomb? Information that somehow hadn’t made it into Roan’s very terse report of all the way back like thirty minutes ago.

Roan must have been aware that at least some explanation was required. “He tried to highjack my ship to take us to his. We didn’t know yet that that the Astrid had engaged the Casisto. Or that it had lost.”

Torval tsked regretfully. “You couldn’t take him into custody? His public hanging would have been a very useful beginning.”

“No,” said Roan. “I couldn’t.”

Raven, on the other hand, focused for the first time on the fact that Roan damn well could have taken Wallace into custody if he’d wanted to. He’d disarmed him and had him on the ground. But he’d never even considered it. The moment he saw Wallace with a gun aimed at her head, he decided to kill him. And he did.

She glanced down at her crutch, resting against her good leg. She didn’t shiver and she didn’t set it down. She only wished she still wanted to.

* * * *

Torval accepted all of Roan’s recommendations.

Once the work of making them operational – completely horrifying in its mundane way – was fully launched, Bellamy requested permission to leave the bridge to check on Clarke.

“Of course,” Torval said. “We’ll notify you as soon as the Casisto has returned to orbit.”

“Perhaps,” Roan added, looking at Raven, “you’d like to accompany Captain Blake to the medical center, Ms. Reyes? I know you’ll want to visit Ms. Griffin, and while you’re there, you could speak to one of the Uralze’s doctors. They have some experience with treating pulsar injuries.”

Only some combination of exhaustion, in body and spirit, plus whatever she’d picked up of ‘diplomatic’ behavior, kept Raven from telling him to fuck himself.

Of course she wanted to see Clarke. Of course she wanted to get the fuck off this bridge. Of course she needed to see a fucking doctor who knew what they were doing, like two weeks ago. But she didn’t want to be so politely and thoughtfully managed into any of it. Not even by her boyfriend. Especially not by her boyfriend. If he even was still her boyfriend, now that he was transforming into Major Prince Roan kom Nia, man with the power to order the fate of millions, right in front of her goddamned eyes.

So she snarled as politely as she could, with a frozen smile on her lips and a death glare in her eyes. “That sounds lovely. Thank you, Major. You are so very thoughtful.”

He raised his eyebrows at her, and she knew he’d heard her real message.

Unfortunately her triumph was short lived. She somehow fumbled the crutch, which slipped as she stood up from the rolling stool and she would have fallen flat on her face if he hadn’t caught her, steadied her, and then handed her off to Bellamy like the broken thing she was.

Once in the cart, and this time she didn’t object when they bundled her into the jumpseat at the back, Bellamy sat right down beside her, forcing her to make room for him. “When was the last time you ate anything?” he asked in a low voice.

Raven had to concentrate hard on this one. Finally she said, “An actual meal? Before I went to the auditorium this…” she paused, trying to work it out, “morning? I did eat some protein bars on the prowler.”

“Raven,” he said, “that means your last proper meal was more than fifteen hours ago. Let’s go get some food.”

He redirected their driver, now their dragooned guide, into taking them to whatever mess was open.

By the time they arrived at the medical center, which was basically a small hospital tucked into the belly of the command carrier, Raven was feeling marginally better. When they walked in, Clarke was propped up in the bed of her small private room, resting against the raised mattress with her eyes closed, but her face lit up with a smile when she opened her eyes at Bellamy’s knock and quiet, “Hey, princess.”

Despite her smile, though, Raven thought Clarke looked like hell. Her skin was so pale even her lips seemed colorless. The dark circles under her eyes and some purpling bruises on her left cheek and jaw were even more startling by contrast.

Raven also knew from a stop at a restroom on the way to the medical center that she herself hardly looked much better, same grey, exhausted tone to her skin, same black circles under eyes. And then there was the added glamor of all those pain lines around her mouth, her greasy hair, and general ‘walking of the undead’ vibe. Or, in her case, ‘lurching of the undead.’

She grinned back at Clarke anyway, and as she hobbled in to the room she hooked her thumb at the man trailing after her. “Next time, it’s Bellamy’s turn to be kidnapped.”

Chapter Text

Raven sat in a chair pulled up close to Clarke’s bed while she and Bellamy shared another breakfast with her, and they caught each other up. Clarke was going to be fine, with sufficient bed rest and recovery time. Her back was a hot mess of bruising, first- and second-degree burns, and pulped tissue, but all of it would eventually heal. The bullet wound would heal faster than her back, in fact. It was a simple in and out, clean and easy.

Then it was obviously Raven’s turn to share what she’d seen and heard on the bridge of the Uralze.

“What’s happened? What’s going to happen?” Clarke demanded, looking back and forth between Raven and Bellamy, who was perched at the foot of Clarke’s bed, eating an apple.“I hate being trapped here. I should be on the bridge.”

“What? Why?” Bellamy sputtered around a mouthful of fruit. “It’s not our place!”

“It’s my fucking back,” Clarke replied, glaring at him in irritation. “And I was the one being charged with crimes against humanity. I damn well do have a place.”

“Well,” Raven said, discovering an unexpected impulse to play peacemaker even though she had no idea what the dispute was, “Bellamy was being charged too, and Admiral Torval did ask him what he thought.”

“And?” Clarke looked meaningfully at Bellamy.

“And I thought Roan was being unnecessarily generous, if you want the truth. He’s trying to let as many of them live as he can, when he could eliminate the threat permanently. It’s the same mistake we made almost a year ago.”

“What?” Raven stared at him in shocked betrayal. “You think they should just blow up the oxygenation plants and leave them all down there to choke to death?”

He shrugged. “Yes. I do. We fought for those people, Clarke and I. When our people wanted to just bomb them flat if they refused to leave, we argued over and over that they deserved better. That they deserved a chance to live, even if we had to dig them out of the rubble of their world one by one. That we could do better. Be better than simple revenge. That we could make the Arcadian Republic stronger by being more compassionate than they ever were. And look what it got us? Fuck all.”

“We were right, Bellamy,” Clarke told him earnestly, her conviction bringing some color back into her cheeks. “You know you believe that too. It’s only this one group of Montoveterians who couldn’t let go. They’re tiny by comparison.”

“And now helpfully all gathered in one, easy-to-deal-with place,” Bellamy pointed out.

“So how is Azgeda going to deal with them?” Clarke asked with a frown.

“They’ve been given twelve hours to organize their dispersal, with whatever resources and support the fleet can offer,” Raven answered. “For every surviving Oligarch, general and Supreme Court judge they give up, they get more time. Then the fleet takes out the plants. After that, maybe fifteen more hours until they’ll be able to feel the reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere. Though it could take up to a week for everyone to die.”

“Is that kind of evacuation even possible? On this scale?” Clarke glanced back and forth between them, her expression aghast.

“No one knows,” Bellamy said, his dismissive shrug making it perfectly clear that he didn’t care if it wasn’t.

Raven shook her head. “Apparently no one’s tried to move four million people in less than a week before. It’s kind of a big old experiment in degrees of human suffering.”

“I should have been there,” Clarke declared. “I could have convinced them to slow it down.” She sat up straighter and looked speculatively at the IV tube in her arm. “Maybe I still can.”

“Clarke!” said Bellamy, reaching out to stop her, then pulling his arm back, letting his hand fall to her ankle instead. “I don’t think you can change a thing. As far as they’re concerned the insult to Azgeda is all. I think Torval would have supported killing every single person on the planet immediately if Roan had recommended that. Tell her, Raven.”

Raven looked at her hands. Finally she dragged her eyes up to look into Clarke’s worried, outraged eyes and sighed. “Bellamy’s right. I think Torval and the other officers all think that twelve hours’ warning and an invitation to leave is being unnecessarily generous. Roan’s order to shoot down people trying to flee without clearance from the fleet made them really happy. So did his ordering summary executions for anyone in their government who sanctioned your abduction or your trial.”

“How is it Roan is the one doing all the ordering?” Clarke asked.

“I think it’s a task set by his mother, the queen.” Raven glanced at Bellamy, who nodded. She turned back to Clarke, and practiced saying it out loud. “Price of getting his commission back. Of coming home.”

“Exactly. Which is why,” Bellamy added very sternly, starring pointedly at Clarke, “we should stay out of it. It’s an Azgeda matter now. Not our responsibility. Let someone else in the galaxy take shit for kicking the Montoveterians around this time. While you stay in bed and rest.”

“For how long?”

“The Casisto will be in Najemo orbit in about two more hours. We can shuttle over and be out of the system and headed for home immediately after that.”

Raven felt her spirits sink at the news. It must have shown on her face, because after a quick glance in her direction, Clarke looked up at Bellamy and said, “Then you should probably go make arrangements.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, his face clearly showing that he thought Clarke's compliance was deeply suspicious. But after a long moment of them staring hard at each other and Raven feeling more uncomfortably voyeuristic by the second, he shrugged and left.

“Tell me everything,” said Clarke, as soon as the door closed on Bellamy’s back. “You look like someone just shot your best friend.”

Raven promptly burst into tears.

Clarke pushed the rolling tray away, held open her arms and scooted over, pulling Raven up onto the bed with her, humming soothing nothings and stroking her hair.

Choked words, messy tears and snot poured out of Raven as she tried to explain all that had happened. She cried for Finn, and Keenan, and herself and for Roma Cordero and for Clarke and for the jolly charter captain and his fancy hat, and the young steward who had served their meal. For all the Montoveterian soldiers whose brains had splattered on the floor in front of her, and everyone else who had and was going to die before it was done, and maybe even for that colossally stupid bastard Cage Wallace. She cried until, finally, she fell asleep.

* * * *

“Hey,” Roan’s quiet voice in her ear made her smile as she felt his fingers gently brushing her hair off her forehead. But then the whole shit show of the last weeks crashed back and Raven jerked her eyes open. She was alone in Clarke’s narrow hospital bed, Clarke was curled up in the chair on the other side of her, wrapped in a blanket and snoring softly, her arm with the IV flung out as though to demonstrate to anyone looking that she was still complying with the rules.

Roan straightened up when he saw she was awake. He was already back in uniform. Someone had even thoughtfully supplied it with all the appropriate insignia. At least he’d rolled the sleeves high, up above his elbows, he hadn’t shaved off his beard, and his hair was still long. Kept him from looking too spit-and-polish. Of course, he also looked disconcertingly comfortable in this new (or was it old?) getup.

“Hey,” Raven said warily, her voice cracking and dry. “What’s going on?”

“Up here? Not much right now. We’ve presented our instructions and are waiting to see what they do. On Najemo, much consternation and confusion. So I thought this might be a good time to meet with one of the doctors onboard. She’s treated a lot of pulsar injuries. Something of an expert. She’s even had time to confer with Dr. Demon Bitch. The Casisto arrived about an hour ago.”

Raven held out her hand so he would help her sit up. “You know she has a real name.”

He smirked at her while he hauled her upright. “Yes, I do. I wasn’t sure you did, though.”

Raven grimaced at him and thought about refusing to go see this new doctor, just on principle, but decided she really didn’t have the energy for an argument about it. Falling asleep with the leg brace still on and she was even more cramped and stiff than usual, and moving hurt more. That Roan had come prepared with a wheelchair and a cup of coffee with exactly the right amount of creamer in it didn’t improve her mood, and she knew she was being an ungrateful sour bitch and she didn’t really care. She was going to scowl silently anyway while nursing her coffee, and ride in silence.

“Do you want to know why I call her that?” she asked him suddenly. Thinking this was as good a moment as any.

“I already know,” he said. “Blake told me. While we were pulling together our rescue operation.”

“Did you punch him again?” she asked, perking up a bit in interest.

“Not this time. But,” he added, sounding amused. “I’d be happy to do so if you wanted me to.”

“Why not?” she demanded, feeling offended.

“Because I might have done the same thing. If our positions were reversed. If I was desperate to find you, and out of other options.”

Raven looked down at the crutch in her hands.

She remembered again watching him use it to break Cage Wallace’s neck.

She remembered how fucking much Dr. Tsing's interrogation had hurt.

She remembered that her entire plan for saving Clarke's life and her own had hinged on her faith that Roan would do whatever it took to get to her.

After that she didn’t have anything to say to him. Or to herself.

The expert was a serious older woman who shook her head gravely when, after her examination, Raven asked if the nerve loss could still be restored.

“Pulsars are a nasty business,” she replied. “I wish they would ban them.”

“Doctor?” Roan said, and it had the salutary effect most things had, Raven was discovering, when uttered by an officer and a prince.

“There is already permanent loss,” the doctor said, her expression flat and clinical. “How much is hard to gauge at this point. At least ten percent, in my opinion.” She looked at Raven and her expression gentled. Marginally. “You need to receive the full neurological treatment as soon as you can, but I will tell you that Dr. Tsing knew what she was about. She handled the initial response exactly by the book, and with very positive results.”

Score one for the Demon Bitch, Raven thought.

The Azgedan Fleet doctor turned and scribbled out a few names on a pad. “Here. I recommend these specialists.”

Roan plucked the list from Raven’s fingers, frowning as he read through it. “These medical centers are all in Azgeda. Do you know anyone in the Arcadian Republic?”

“You’re taking her there?” The doctor clearly disapproved.

“Hey!” Raven snapped, reaching for the list. “I’m taking me there. It’s much closer to my home. And I have friends in Sanaero.”

One. She had one friend in Sanaero. But that one friend would be enough.

“They are all very competent, and it’s a standard protocol,” the doctor sniffed. “Just ask lots of questions.”

“We will,” Roan said, and straightened up to help Raven back to the wheelchair. She wanted to object to the wheelchair, but in the face of the mind-breaking size of the Uralze, and the now constant firey ache in her hip and back, decided this was one of those ‘better discretion over valor’ things.

“We, alpha dog?” Raven said, once they were back in the hall.

“I’m boyfriending.”

The deep, deep pleasure she took in his words, and the grin she couldn’t quite suppress, undercut the defiance she’d been going for when she said, “You’re not in charge of me.”

They needed to talk again, and soon, because events kept outstripping them, and at a whiplash-inducing pace, but at least, her stupid heart told her, there still seemed to be something to talk about.

“I know I’m not,” he said calmly. “But you need someone else to ask questions.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do. You glare angrily and look like you’re going to cry, which upsets the nice doctors and so they just tell you soothing bullshit.”

“You loom!”

“Right. It’s a tag team effort.”

Raven thought about what he’d said. “It’s going to be a lot more than ten percent permanent loss, isn’t it?” her voice was small, but she couldn’t seem to make it big. Or as devil-may-care as she wanted.

He pushed her chair into the next waiting-area/cul-de-sac they passed so he could take a seat in front of her. “I think so. I’d toss you in the prowler right now and leave, but I can’t until the evacuation of Najemo is proceeding smoothly. And you’re committed to observe until then. Twenty-four more hours, maybe thirty-six, and we’re on our way.”

Her lungs pinched. “That will be fifteen days.”

Fifteen to forty-five percent, her stupid little calculator reminded her.

“I know.” He covered her hands with his. “I know.”

“Then three more ship days to Montovetero,” she said. She was learning to read the star maps at a glance.

“Unless…”

Raven interrupted him, following his train of thought all too easily. “No. I’m not getting in one of your fucking cryotanks. It’s a living tomb.”

“I’ve carried a lot of people in them. Including Clarke. They’re all fine.”

“Huh.” She raised a challenging brow. “Let’s go ask her. And,” she made a face at him, “what other people?”

That was when she learned more about what he’d been doing, along with hunting and selling mutant zoo animals to rich assholes. He’d been helping the various colonies of human mutants find each other, and then carrying leaders or others back and forth between them while they slept in his cyrotanks, no one else in the galaxy the wiser about his efforts. Or theirs.

Raven felt a little bit like she had when she’d discovered the shiny rich blue of Azgeda under the tiny cracks in the black paint on his body armor. Under so many layers of camouflage that no one would find it easily, there was at least a little bit of a shiny hero buried in Roan. Also a lot of arrogant, highhanded asshole. And the latter was probably all that made the former bearable to her.

They walked in on an argument.

Or at least Bellamy was arguing. Clarke was back in the bed, still wearing the standard hospital gown, the IV securely in her arm. She was propped on pillows and had the blankets tucked snugly around her legs. When she saw them, she waved her fingertips in a quick little welcome and smiled brightly, mouthing ‘wait’ when they started to back out again.

Bellamy hadn’t seen them yet. He was standing near the foot of the bed, waving his arms at a pile of clothes. “Why aren’t you changed? The nurses said you could be transferred to the Casisto’s medbay any time!”

“I told you. I’m staying here until Raven is ready to go and travelling with her,” Clarke gestured at Raven, letting Bellamy know they had company. “Given the state the Casisto is in, we’ll probably beat you back to Sanaero anyway.”

Bellamy ran his hand through his hair, which was still a mess despite the fact that he’d also managed to get back into uniform while Raven was asleep.

“Clarke.” He was straining for reasonable, Raven could tell. “Every time you’ve travelled alone in the last six months everything has gone straight to hell. You’ve got a target on your back and you don’t take enough precautions and you can’t just keep running around the galaxy like no one knows who you are!”

“That’s only one way to look at it!” Clarke exclaimed while smiling brightly, trying, it seemed to Raven, to talk him down.

Bellamy had his hands on his hips now. “Really? Is there some other way to look at it?”

“Of course. I met Roan, who introduced me to Una, and now I’m in a much better position to help her and her people, which was always my goal. We’ve learned a lot more about the Commander’s long-range plans, and more about the importance of the chips, and a possible way to beat them. And why the mutants worry her so much.”

Bellamy scowled.

“Plus,” Clarke continued, nodding at Roan and Raven, “we’ve made some good connections with the Azgeda, Cage Wallace is dead, and your speech on Najemo has already been replayed more than all of Wallace’s performances combined. You’re as famous as me now!” She smiled brilliantly, her pleasure in this completely genuine as far as Raven could tell.

On the other hand, Raven thought Bellamy suddenly looked like he wanted to puke.

“So, really,” Clarke concluded happily, “I think things have worked out mostly very well.”

“Only a mostly?” Bellamy’s scowl was truly impressive.

Clarke nodded at Raven. “Raven’s injury sucks. And people died who shouldn’t have. But maybe more people won’t die later on. If we can build on what’s happened these last few weeks.”

“On that front, I think you’ll like my news,” Roan said, from his post propping up the wall behind Raven. “I’ve secured authorization to offer the lease on Najemo to Una and her people. The first recognized home world for their kind since the Trikru chased them out centuries ago.”

Clarke’s mouth fell open in a picture of shocked surprise, and then her expression slowly transformed into a grin of pure joy. “Woohoo!” she cried, practically bouncing as she cheered exuberantly, waving her hands and clapping and hooting wildly.

“I’d leap out of bed and hug you,” she said to Roan, “but I’d end up flashing my bum and embarrassing Bellamy!”

Even the idea of that seemed to make Bellamy flush, though Raven wasn’t sure if embarrassment was exactly the emotion he was feeling.

Because Clarke? Clarke was transformed.

She was always a pretty woman, but right now, despite the hospital gown, despite the gunshot wound, despite the torture, despite her exhaustion, she was almost ethereal, positively glowing with happiness. It was like a small sun had decided to take up residence in the heart of the Uralze.

Roan was grinning back at her, clearly hugely pleased with himself, and delighted by Clarke’s reaction.

“Does Una know?” Clarke asked.

“No,” he shook his head. “I don’t want to tell her until Najemo is cleared, and all the legal work is finished. I don’t want their claim screwed up by something happening too soon.”

Raven looked back and forth between them, and said, “I hate to be the big grump here, but I thought the Heda was deeply opposed to any recognition for mutants?” She looked at Clarke. “I could swear you told me that she actively wants to exterminate them all?”

“She is actively trying to do that,” Roan said. “That’s who the Nightbloods are. They’re Trikru mutant hunters, but not the kind who work with zoos, or the drug makers, or even the slavers. They’re, basically, death squads.”

“I thought they were a myth!” Raven objected.

“No. Not a myth. I got hit by them not long after I left for exile, and nearly died. Would have died, but their leader recognized me and took me to the Heda. It wasn’t that long after Lexa had ascended.” He looked at Clarke then, “She even still went by Lexa. That’s how she introduced herself to me when I woke up in a hospital in Tondisi. I got better, spent some time learning more about mutants from her, and their history on Polis. When I asked how I could thank her, she offered me a chip. I asked for the night to think about it, escaped the hospital and fled.”

“So why in the ‘verse did you go back?” Raven asked him.

“I wanted to clear my debt,” he said, looking at Raven. “Close out that part of my life. Be free to start something new.”

Raven felt like a piece of Clarke’s sun had just taken up residence in her own chest, all glowy and warm. She almost didn’t hear Bellamy’s question.

“And taking Clarke to her was payment?” Bellamy asked, his face dark with disapproval.

“Yes,” Roan replied blithely, completely uninterested in Bellamy’s glower. “Word was out that the Heda wanted the Cefodemorta and would pay handsomely to get her. Though when I ran into Clarke, I didn’t actually know who she was yet. I just thought she was another hunter. One looking to profit from the human mutant trade. So I took her out.”

“After I shot you!” Clarke cried. “You don’t need to make it sound like it was easy.”

“Wait,” Raven said, looking back and forth between them, “that was you? You shot him?”

“Yeah.” Clarke looked smug. “I did.”

“And then I stuffed you in my cryotank,” he said.

Clarke rolled her eyes. “Pfft. Details.”

“Which is really why we’re here,” Roan said. “I want Raven to think about it. Every day matters more. It would stop any further nerve loss until we reach Sanaero.”

Clarke looked and Raven and nodded seriously. “That’s a very good idea. You really should think about it. What is the time, by prowler? Three days, give or take? Then getting everything set up for treatment? That’s a lot of loss you could prevent.”

“And you didn’t feel like you’d died?” Raven asked, already reconsidering despite telling herself to stop it right this instant.

“No! I was too pissed off,” Clarke laughed lightly. “And I figured if he wanted me dead, I would be. Turned out he believed enough of what I told him that he took me to Una. I hadn’t met her before, but I had met others who could vouch for me. And so I asked Roan to take me to Lexa, because I was sure that was who wanted me. Thought it could be big wins all around.” Clarke’s face lost its light, and now she just looked sad again. “I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.”

“And now what?” Bellamy said, spreading his disapproval equally among all of them. “The Heda is just going to accept a mutant home world?”

Roan met Bellamy’s gaze, his blue eyes suddenly arctic and his small, twisted smile doing nothing to mask his vindictive anger. “She tried to seize control of Azgeda succession by co-opting me into her coalition, and into her collective. She’s not in a position to complain about what we do now.”

Raven swallowed hard at that ‘we.’

“Besides,” Roan said, with his smile broadening in more genuine amusement because pissing off people he didn’t like generally did amuse him, “she’s already getting something. We’ve accepted her offer to take in all those from Najemo who can find no other home.”

“Why would the Heda offer to take any of their refugees, or they want to go?” Raven asked.

“They mostly don’t. Other settlements of Montoveterians inside Azgeda space have offered resettlement spaces for just over half of the population on Najemo. Half the remainder will travel to Montoveterian settlements in the outlying systems, or have contacts who will sponsor them other places. That leaves, more or less, about six-hundred thousand who will have to accept refuge in Trikru System. I understand they’re gearing up to welcome them with a big ceremony.”

Raven remembered Clarke’s description of the ceremony the Heda had sprung on them before the melee. “She’s going to offer them chips,” she said.

“Yes. I think so,” Roan agreed.

“Why would you want to let her have all those potential enemies – enemy of my enemy and all that?”

“It’s not all that many bodies in the larger scheme, and when she complains about Una and her people, we can remind her that she’s already taken her share of the spoils.”

* * * *

“Why you?” Raven demanded, once she and Roan were alone in the temporary quarters she’d been assigned. “Why did it have to be your decision?”

“My mother wanted it that way,” he replied, kneeling on the floor in front of her as she sat on the edge of the bed, his hands busily undoing the fastenings on her leg brace. “I’m indirectly responsible for the problem. It was therefore, in her view, my job to clean it up.”

“How are you responsible for Cage Wallace being a fucking idiot?”

He sat back on his heels and laughed, which made him seem more like his old self, the guy she knew from Mecha Station. “I am most definitely NOT responsible for that. But, I did send his target – Clarke – off on an un-vetted charter because the captain was an old friend of mine. I also asked for and received authorization to send out the scout ships, both of which were lost with their full complements. Ten men each. All of them died. Including my friend. And his crew. I completely underestimated the danger to Clarke, and to Azgeda, represented by Montovetero in exile. That,” he looked away from her as he set her brace down behind him, next the wall, “is all on me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your friend. I liked him. I liked his hat.”

He looked at her then, and offered her a small smile and a quick, grateful nod of acknowledgment.

Dropping his gaze as he unlaced and tugged off of her boots, he continued, “And, as my mother made plain when I talked with her from Huronpoint Hub, ending up as part of the Heda’s new galactic coalition circus was also on me.”

“How?” Raven demanded. “You and Clarke didn’t know that was going to happen!”

Using his shoulder for balance, she pulled herself to her feet and began shimmying out of her trousers. She was used to loose coveralls, but had succumbed to the lure of the look of her ass in the snug cut. Succumbed to the appreciative gleam in Roan’s eyes when she hopped out of the dressing room and struck a pose.

“No, we didn’t,” he said, the light in his eyes still appreciative as he helped her. And his hands were warm on the skin of her bare calves as he pushed them all the way off. “But,” he drew his eyes reluctantly up to her face, “I agreed to Clarke’s ridiculous plan. It seemed like a way to do something about my own situation that felt less risky than just talking to you. Not because it was actually a good idea.”

He dropped his eyes again and tapped her ankle so she’d lift her other foot, “And the consequences if I’d taken part in the melee would have been very messy. Escaping in a debris cloud was the better option.”

She huffed wryly, asking, “Especially escaping in a debris cloud disguised as a gas leak?”

His snort of laughter was both mocking and rueful. “Especially then.”

“So you had to clean up the Montovetero problem as reparation for various offences,” she said, pulling off her shirt and bra.

“Yes.”

“And as a reward, you get what you’ve wanted all along? To offer the mutants a recognized a home world?” She looked directly at him. “That’s what you argued with your mother about, isn’t it? Doing something for Una and her people?”

He stood up and held out his hands, steadying her as she hopped the few steps to the privy and its shower.

“When did you figure that out?” he asked, once she was inside the shower stall.

“In bits and pieces. Some from Clarke. And then of course Una herself, coming to help you.”

“Coming to help me get you away from them.”

“And rescue Clarke.” She leaned on the wall and stuck her head out to look at him.

He nodded. “Of course.”

But Raven knew he didn’t mean it, and he knew she knew. Not that he didn’t like or respect Clarke, because he did. But without Raven getting all tangled up in the Avatar’s business, Roan wouldn’t necessarily have felt inclined to intervene in quite the same way. Or at all, if they’d both been at Mecha instead, and far from the center, insulated by distance and ignorance both.

But knowing all that didn’t change the fact that Major kom Nia was back in Her Majesty’s Service. Raven closed the curtain and reached for the shampoo.

“What happens next?” she called out, when she was rinsing away the lather.

He stepped into the tiny shower, pressing close behind her, pulling her against his bare chest as he slid his hands up her torso to capture her tits.

Leaning her head back onto his broad shoulder, she closed her eyes, laced her fingers through his and held him close. Desire was the only answer he had, so it was the one she have to accept.

* * * *

The air on Najemo smelled acrid, sulfurous and burnt.

Raven looked around at the littered streets, wrinkling her nose and wishing vaguely that she could cover her face with one of Una’s scarves.

There had been riots. Or, rather, one long undulating riot that flared up and down for nearly a day before Azgedan troops finally had gotten it under control just a few hours earlier.

Once the population of Najemo realized that the eviction order was real, that it was happening, and that the oxygen was already being turned off one polar melting plant at a time, they had started to panic.

People began to swarm the lines for refugee placements in the civic center, for the shuttles at the handful of shuttle ports. They started pushing and shoving, arguing about the ethics of holding spaces and jumping in to join friends. Shoving escalated to fist fights over people trying to haul too much baggage with them, taking up precious shuttle space and limited weight allowances. Thrown fists evolved into multi-person scuffles, then brawls, and in the center, at the shuttle ports, employees had begun to lose control.

Then the first signs of oxygen deprivation had begun to manifest: dizziness, loss of focus or coordination, poor judgment…. All the things that the station-born were trained from early childhood on to recognize and compensate for turned out to be a complete mystery to people raised in the free air of an oxygen-rich planet like Montovetero. Instead of calming down, they amped up. Which made everything worse.

They had stormed the civic center, the shuttle ports, and then the shuttles themselves. Destroying several in the process, until the pilots had started refusing to land.

The Oligarchs’ armed forces had fought back, reasserting control at the two larger shuttle ports. But they held only until the word got out that three of the ten Oligarchs had been arrested on the first fleeing ship, which had, in the end, stood down. After that, the troops tore off their insignia and joined the mobs. In their fury, rioters smashed up both of the remaining shuttle ports, the auditorium, the government offices, the commercial district, the schools and the health clinics. Any and every physical manifestation of the rule of Oligarchs fell to their rage.

That’s when the fires started.

General Emerson, proving himself a better man than Raven had thought he must be, managed to rally enough people to help him get one of the shuttle ports re-opened, and to police the lines there to get the sick, the injured, the old and the young out first, even as the city was burning untended behind them. Then he asked Admiral Torval for help. And lastly, he turned himself in, along with six of the seven judges from the tribunal that had attempted to try Clarke and Bellamy.

With prowlers from the Uralze hovering, and Azgedan troops landing by the score, the city slowly calmed.

But by then, several hundreds of people had been killed or injured, mostly by being trampled, or in the explosions as the fire found gas lines or oxygen stores.

With the polar plants offline, the fires quieted, turning to smoldering ash rather than roaring flames.

The air wasn’t truly dangerous yet, but emergency oxygen tents were set up near the long lines that were now snaking in an orderly way around the reopened shuttle fields.

Organized departures began again.

The Azgedans restarted a few of the melting plants, as much a psychological improvement as a real one, though that helped too.

But the air still smelled.

Roan had flown Raven down to the planet surface, landing in the same open area near the now destroyed auditorium, and currently the site where the Azgedan fleet command was staging their operations. She’d asked to tour the damaged city, so she could absorb and record the full extent of the panic and fear, as well as observe the process of the eviction. She also had wanted to retrieve her notes and recordings from the days before Roan and Bellamy arrived. The barracks where she’d been quartered were trashed, but had escaped the flames. Her scattered materials were found undamaged.

It was after that, while she was being escorted through a reopened clinic, that she saw her. Sitting by the bedside of a heavily bandaged child, reading from a book of illustrated nursery rhymes. A slim, fair young woman with serious eyes and nervous fingers, she still wouldn’t look Raven in the face.

Approaching slowly, the only way she could, but it still seemed appropriate, Raven asked hesitatingly, “Keenan?”

The young woman, only a few years younger than Raven herself, looked up. Her eyes weren’t young at all anymore.

“Keenan?” Raven repeated, just to be sure.

“Yes, I’m Keenan,” she said, her voice low and raspy from smoke.

“I’m Raven, Raven Reyes. We met, very briefly.”

“I know who you are.”

“I saw…” Raven faltered. “Finn?”

Keenan shook her head.

Raven nodded, swallowing hard. She’d seen his sightless eyes. Seen the blood fly.

“I’m so sorry,” Raven said. It was so paltry. It was all she had. She looked again, carefully, and didn’t see any sign that Keenan been shot at all, but couldn’t think of any way to ask. She settled on, “How are you?”

“He shielded me. I wasn’t shot.”

Raven smiled then. “He would, without hesitation. That’s who he was.”

“He loved me.”

“I know. He told me. But I could see it, in his face.”

Keenan just nodded.

“Do you know?” Raven asked, “where you’ll be going?”

“Like everyone else at the back of the line I’ll be going to whatever camps have been set aside by the Heda, in Trikru System.”

Just then a health care worker bustled up. “Keenan!” he said heartily. “I wanted to thank you again for all your help with the children.” He turned to Raven, “You’re from the UIS, yes?”

Raven nodded.

“Is there anything I can do, anything else you’d like to see or ask?” he offered.

“The children?” Raven said, nodding at the half-dozen or so small figures in the cots, “Are their parents around?”

“Well, we hope!” he said, with that air of determined cheer she’d seen on all the experienced refugee and aid workers who’d arrived in the last days, most of them, like this man, Azgedan. It turned out, Raven had learned, that terraforming was a dangerous and unpredictable undertaking. Things went wrong fairly often, so the Queen maintained sizable relief and aid operations.

The aid worker leaned closer and dropped his voice slightly, confiding, “Things were very chaotic here for a bit, and too many families were separated. It will take some time to sort everyone back out.” He straightened up again. “In the meantime, Mrs. Collins here has been so helpful. She volunteered to stay with the children.”

Keenan smiled wanly when Raven looked at her again.

“I’m just so glad you weren’t hurt. I thought both of you….” Raven trailed off.

“Were shot by your mutants? Protecting your ship? The one that came for the Cefodemorta? For Butcher Blake?” Keenan turned out to have a bit of spine in her after all.

Raven wanted to protest that it wasn’t her ship, that they were no one’s mutants but their own, that she’d been trying to get Finn and Keenan off the planet with her, but she knew none of those remarks would be useful or kind. So she just nodded.

The aid worker gave her a long side-eye.

Raven cleared her throat. “Wallace grabbed me off of a private charter at gun point, threatened to shoot me, kept me here without allowing me to leave or to contact anyone off planet. His soldiers murdered the charter captain and his crew. My friends believed themselves to be rescuing me from a situation I didn’t choose.”

The aid worker opened his eyes in surprise, then his face cleared and he shook his head in muted disbelief. “That Wallace fellow was a fool playing a dangerous game. The survivors here are all just lucky Queen Nia didn’t see fit to punish the whole of his people for his hubris.”

“This isn’t punishment?” Raven asked, feeling faintly astonished at his rather blasé attitude.

“I think Nia could have turned off the air and left everyone here to die and no one in Azgeda would have disagreed with her right to do that,” he replied calmly. “It would have been extreme, but within her authority. Reminded everyone that our Peace is the Queen’s Peace and to challenge it, is to challenge her. To challenge her, is to destroy the safety and security of Azgeda. Instead, most of the people from Najemo will live.” He beamed happily at Keenan. “Including Mrs. Collins here, and her baby.”

Raven turned to look at Keenan in shock, her jaw flapping uselessly.

Keenan flushed, but raised her chin defiantly. “Yes. I guess he didn’t mention it?”

“No, he didn’t,” Raven said, half-laughing in reaction and surprise and unable to stop despite feeling it was quite inappropriate. She got ahold of herself and added, “I’m sure he was planning to tell me! Things were just really…intense.”

And she’d been completely absorbed in her own problems, and in saving Clarke’s life. That she hadn’t fully calculated the cost of that was something she’d have to find a way to live with on her own. Looking at Finn’s young widow now, she wrinkled her brow in new concern, “Keenan? Do you have friends you’re going to be with? People to help you?”

“All of my family are dead. Most of my friends, too. Sanaero was my home.”

Raven had been afraid of that. Finn had always been attracted to the lost and alone.

“You know, Finn’s parents would take you in immediately….” Raven suddenly realized how that would sound, and hastened to add, “They would no matter what, and I should have thought of it sooner, but especially now. You shouldn’t be alone. Mecha isn’t in the center of anything, but it’s quiet. And the people there mostly mind their own business. There are even some other families from Montovetero.”

Keenan looked completely nonplussed by this.

“I will find the right people and make sure you have the option, okay?” Raven remembered the chips. She had no idea if a pregnant person could take one, of what happened if they did, but it seemed like a really bad idea. “Please, think about it?”

Keenan’s expression didn’t change, but at last she bobbed her head, one quick short nod of permission.

Raven would have said more, but a soldier in Azgeda uniform appeared. “Ms. Reyes?” she called. “It’s time.”

Raven managed a strained smile, and turned to follow her guide. She glanced back over her shoulder, but Keenan was already bending over the bandaged child. Raven blew out a deep breath, one full of relief and regret so twisted up she couldn’t have untangled them fully if she spent a lifetime at it.

Her final official duty was to observe the end of the story of Montovetero as an independent government anywhere in the galaxy.

Raven and Clarke stood with what remained of the civil authorities of Najemo, those who had stayed to see the last of their fellow citizens off the planet. Alongside them were the heads of the Azgedan relief agencies, representatives from Trikru, and from the smaller systems accepting refugees. They all watched in silence as generals, judges, and Oligarchs were led out onto a platform set with two-dozen nooses.

Newsreaders and camerapeople were present from every major news outlet in the galaxy who could reach Najemo in time. The fleet had kept them from landing until a few hours ago. They outnumbered dignitaries by something like five to one, in Raven’s rough estimation.

As a neutral observer, and for herself, Raven had formally asked the Admiral what had pushed the Montoveterian’s actions to the level of treason.

Admiral Torval explained that each Oligarch had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to House Azgeda, and to Nia herself. The judges, government ministers, and the Generals had all sworn to uphold the system-wide laws and regulations of House Azgeda, as well as whatever laws they held for Najemo. Then they shot down Azgedan ships, and assaulted the representatives of neutral or allied systems. Treason by any measure.

It was all in the lease to the planet, he assured her. She asked for a copy.

It was all there. And the penalty for violating the Queen’s Peace was clearly spelled out.

Death by hanging.

It was quick.

And surprisingly dignified.

Roan stood toward the back of the rows of Azgedan officers who were there observing, and in their own weird, military way, paying respect to Carl Emerson. Roan had his hair pulled all the way back in a low queue and his eyes were shielded under a brimmed cloth cap, just as all the other Azgedan officers wore. Raven was as certain as she could be that the news media failed entirely to notice that he was even there.

None among the Azgeda drew attention to him either.

****

Afterwards, while the audience was still dispersing, Raven and Roan approached Admiral Torval and Roan informed him that he would be taking personal leave, beginning immediately.

“I need to accompany my partner to the University of Montovetero hospital,” Roan explained, glancing at Raven.

“Ms. Reyes?” Torval sighed. “You haven’t made any great secret of it, have you?”

“It’s not a secret, sir.”

“You know that leave is reserved for family emergencies, Major.”

“Ms. Reyes and I have been domestic partners for more than a year, sir. Which qualifies us under the relevant rules and regulations.”

Raven hoped she wasn’t gaping as much as Torval was.

Roan shrugged lightly. “Please feel free to contact the authorities on Mecha Station. They will confirm that when I am in residence there, I live with Ms. Reyes, and I have done so for more than the required year.”

Raven frowned, and then realized that he was telling the complete truth. He never stayed on Mecha long, but, especially in the last year, he was there every few weeks, and he always stayed with her. In fact, she looked over to him and blurted out, “When haven’t you stayed with me?”

He looked confused too, and then he grinned back at her. “Since we met? I’ve never stayed over anywhere else but your apartment.”

Raven slid her hand into his, and looked at Torval. “Then it’s four years. We’ve been domestic partners,” Raven decided she rather liked the way that rolled off her tongue, “for four years. That’s way past the minimum. Isn’t it?” she smiled brightly.

It was.

But before he allowed them to go, Torval fixed Roan with a particularly sharp stare and said, “You’ve barely been back on duty five days. Are you certain this is wise? Ms. Reyes will have plenty of support from Arcadia and from her own authorities with the UIS.”

Roan raised his eyes to Torval’s. “I did not seek this new commission, and I was not consulted on the timing. If you think it would be better for me to resign than to take personal leave so soon, I will, of course, accept your recommendation.”

Raven held her breath, more than half-hoping Torval would accept Roan’s offer, but at the same time, not in the least bit surprised when he didn’t.

Chapter Text

“I look ridiculous!” Raven said, glaring at her reflection in the large makeup mirror. “Like a clown!”

She had on more makeup at this particular moment than she thought she’d ever worn, cumulatively, across her entire quarter-century plus of life. It actually felt heavy on her face, and she worried it would start to crack and flake off, or worse, melt off under the lights.

“You look great,” Gina said loyally from her spot hovering just behind Raven. “And it’s for the cameras!”

The cameras. Right, Raven sighed under her breath. For the cameras. This was a publicity stunt for the UIS, and for Mecha. It would also, Raven passionately hoped, be an effective way to stem the seemingly endless requests for interviews or comments from her that had flooded Mecha in the months since Cage Wallace’s circus of a show trial on Najemo.

Which didn’t stop her from grumbling up at her friend’s reflection. “I look like I’m made of plastic.”

“No! Gina’s right.” Callie Cartwright appeared behind Gina. “You do look great.”

Cartwright was the head of Public Relations for the UIS, and the woman who had masterminded this entire operation. An hour-long program, hosted by one of the most popular chat hosts out of Azgeda. It would feature an interview with Raven focused on the UIS and the Neutral Observer program, interspersed with other interviews and reporting that the host and crew had done over the past few days on the station.

“What the cameras pick up requires a whole different approach to makeup, nothing like your daily routines,” Cartwright was saying, while Raven continued to frown horribly at her reflection.

“I don’t have a daily routine!” she snarled in exasperation. “I’m a fucking mechanical engineer. I work in system maintenance and ship repair. Full face-paint is not part of my regular life! And neither,” she added with another terrible frown at her reflection, “is big hair.”

“You’re a beautiful young woman, whose face is recognizable across half of the galaxy thanks to all the drama on Najemo,” Cartwright said in a tone that was half-admonishment, half-pep talk. “People want to see that. The UIS wants people to see that.”

“How is big hair a part of that?” Raven demanded.

“It’s fashionable right now. Young. Hip. With it.”

Raven spun in her chair to glare directly at Cartwright. “It is not possible to sound more out of touch than to say, ‘young, hip, with it’.”

Cartwright just laughed, and checked her watch. “Thank you,” she said nodding to the various makeup and hair people. “You’ve done great work.” Then she smiled brightly at Raven and Gina. “Come on. We need to stay as close to on-schedule as we can.”

Raven added her muttered thanks to the staff. She knew it wasn’t their fault the cameras apparently required that she look like a fool. The Cartwright ushered Gina and her out of the apartment that their neighbors had been only too willing to lend out. They were thrilled be so close to an intersystem vid star. Not Raven. Or Roan. The chat host.

The borrowed apartment was two doors down from the unit Roan and Raven had purchased together after her treatments in Sanaero had been completed.

Six weeks into the nerve regeneration therapy, it had become clear to Raven that her damaged nerves would never heal as well as they’d hoped. Improvement in her leg and hip was slowing, and the doctors were predicting a permanent twenty to twenty-five percent loss in both mobility and sensation. She’d realized then that she would need to move. Her old apartment had been, by habit and preference, just about as far from the markets and the crowds as possible. It also hadn’t been particularly close to any elevators. She used to run the three flights of stairs up from the nearest thoroughfare to reach her door.

After her injury, all that extra distance, not to mention the stairs, would have just added exhaustion to her already busy day. So, gathering her courage, she’d asked Roan to split a down payment with her on an apartment near the main residential atrium. She’d figured if she had to move, she might as well move on up to someplace nice. Maybe a unit where she’d actually be able to see plants out her window if she craned her neck the right way. Two months on a green planet, and she’d developed a surprising affection for growing things. She’d hoped, with plenty of confidence to be sure, that he’d be willing to help her out.

He’d counter-offered, proposing to pay for half, period. And showed her pictures of the one Gina had already picked out for them, at his request. It was right on the main atrium, on the fourth floor, three apartments down from the elevator, and a short tram ride from the markets. Which also, he pointed out, delivered to addresses in the residential center.

“I can’t afford that!” she’d exclaimed, torn between horror at the prospective cost and an overwhelming desire to move in immediately, as she’d poured over the glossy pictures of the large open studio, full of bright light spilling through the big front windows.

“Of course you can afford it!” he’d said. “And completely on your own if you’d really prefer. You’ll be paid for all your time as a neutral observer, remember?”

She hadn’t remembered. She hadn’t even noticed. She’d been too consumed with the dramas unfolding in front of her, and then with her own pain and recovery.

Roan turned out to be right, of course. Observers were paid for their time. The price for their services was calculated on a sliding scale adjusted for the wealth of the parties involved, the significance of the matter under observation, and the time required. Raven’s service had been short, but Raven’s time had also involved the three richest systems in the galaxy – the Arcadian Republic, Trikru System, and Azgeda – and matters of great significance. Even after the UIS took their thirty-five percent cut, Raven was going to bank a very hefty sum.

“So why would you want to give me the money if I don’t need it?” she’d asked him, faintly bewildered by the gesture.

He’d frowned at her. “I don’t want to give you the money. I want to own half of our apartment.”

“Oh,” she’d said. “Oh.”

Then her heart had swelled so big inside her chest that she’d half-seriously wondered if it could burst from happiness. Because she’d just discovered that emergency family leave and shared real estate could be, in the right large strong hands, intensely romantic gestures.

And then she’d fucked him silly.

They’d moved in a month later, when her treatments were done. She’d never had any more recovery. The leg brace would remain a permanent part of her life. She had, on good days, a mild limp and no pain. On bad days, she needed a crutch to get around and heat and ice before she could sleep. Physical therapy would be required for as long as she wanted to keep walking on her own leg.

Over the half a year since, they’d settled in. They’d bickered genially over clashing tastes, he’d almost always deferred to hers. And somewhat less genially over standards for domestic tidiness. Hers hadn’t even begun to rise to his, product of military boarding schools from childhood on that he was. In this, his standards had prevailed.

She’d wanted real plants, then kept killing them before he’d finally introduced her to ferns. He believed in labor-saving appliances, she’d protested that those were affectations of people with more money than sense. She used every single one that had appeared in their apartment with pleasure and a clear conscience.

Somewhere along the line, she’d discovered home decorating journals. She’d known, of course, that such things existed. For other people. Now she poured over them with the same fascination she’d once reserved for mechanical specs. Roan started teasing her that he never knew what the apartment was going to look like the next time he opened the front door.

She loved every square millimeter of it with a fierceness that she found more than a little absurd if she thought about it too hard or too long. So she didn’t.

So how she’d agreed to let this interview invade their home, her home, and share it with the prying eyes of the rest of the galaxy, she could no longer remember. It was a really terrible idea and… her inner monologue came to a crashing halt as soon as she was through the front door.

“What the fuck have you done to my apartment?” she wailed.

Nothing, literally nothing, remained of the furniture and books and art and plants she’d so carefully chosen and placed.

Everything, from the fuchsia sofa with the excessively interesting arms and feet, through the garish paintings on the wall, to the collection of odd sculptures on the shelves where her books and pictures and plants were supposed to be, and ending with the polished metal slab serving as a coffee table, was completely foreign to her.

And then there were the umbrella lights and the microphones and the cameras, and color-coded cords snaking across the floor to trip the unwary. Or people whose left foot dragged when they walked unless they thought about it every goddamn step of the way.

“Staging!” Raven whirled on Cartwright. “You said there would be ‘some staging’! You did not say you were going to get rid of every single thing I own!”

Cartwright actually flushed a little. “I know. I understand.” She shrugged and held out her hands apologetically. “We got a little carried away. Each of these pieces is the work of a different designer from the UIS. This interview will be shown throughout the galaxy. People will see things they like and want one of their own. So we want to drive the business to our people.”

Her balled fists planted firmly on her hips, Raven growled, “We better get our things back.”

“Of course!” Cartwright laughed reassuringly, “Of course! All your things are right across the hall! We’ll move everything back exactly how it was before.”

Raven didn’t believe her for one second. They would put everything in the wrong places, she just knew it. Then a horrifying new thought froze her blood.

“My worktable, did you touch it?” Her voice might have risen to a screech.

“No, no, no!” Cartwright hastily assured her, pointing. “We just put up a screen. Major kom Nia insisted.”

Raven whirled to look, and discovered Cartwright was telling the truth. There was a large, three-panel folding screen, shiny black lacquer with a star map picked out in tiny, light-catching crystals set up between her worktable and the rest of the living area.

Roan appeared just then from behind the temporary fabric walls shielding the kitchen and sleeping areas from view.

“Please,” he said with a weary fixed smile, repeating himself for about the nine-hundredth time in the last five days, “call me Roan. I’m not in uniform or on duty right now.”

“Of course,” Cartwright flushed, “your...”

“And my other title only means anything inside Azgeda. Which is no where near here.” He turned away from Cartwright and came to stand next to Raven. “It’s not so bad, that screen. In a kind of overdone way.”

She turned her head enough to side-eye him.

He looked down at her, his expression smooth and innocent. “It protects your things.”

“You want to keep it. So you don’t have to look at my table when I’m not working.”

She’d figured out months ago that at least part of the reason he’d wanted fifty percent ownership in their apartment was because her old impulse to pile and stack rather than sort and put things away drove him batty. He’d wanted to be in a position to object. And win.

“Maybe?” he said.

She looked back at the screen. It was so incredibly garish it somehow came out on the other side and ended up eccentric and interesting. “How heavy is it? Can I move it myself?”

“It’s well balanced and on sliding casters.”

“Fine.” She sighed heavily, adopting a much-put-upon air and fighting back a smile at his victorious expression. “You can buy it. If you really want it.”

He grinned at her, started to lean forward and then shifted back. “I’d kiss you but I don’t want to mess anything up.”

“Thank you. For reminding me I look like a freak.”

“No. You look like a video star.”

“If that was supposed to reassure me…” She grumbled, raising her eyes to his. She saw the warmth and support and pride there, and finished, “It kinda worked.”

“Raven!” Cartwright called brightly, “Let’s get started!”

* * * *

“Hello, everyone,” crooned Nikita, the willowy chat host from Azgeda, leaning intimately towards the camera. “I’m here on Mecha Station with the biggest galactic sensation of the last year!” Nikita sat back and the frame opened up to include Raven. “UIS Representative and Station Engineer Raven Reyes!”

Raven smiled for the camera. Or tried to, anyway. She was fairly certain it would read as an embarrassed smirk. ‘Biggest Galactic Sensation,’ her fine ass. That title was still Clarke’s. Or possibly Bellamy Blake’s.

She’d witnessed the initial madness from her safe perch in the hospital in Sanareo.

After the dramatically publicized events on Najemo, Clarke and Bellamy had both been relentlessly pursued by the press and by a public clamoring for their stories. Bellamy had been able to duck making any formal statement, protected by the Arcadian Defense Ministry and his own Marines, and had finally fled back into space on the Casisto. Clarke had vanished into the labyrinthine Arcadian diplomatic service, where she did have a formal – if vague – position (Avatar wasn't an actual title of course), and had appeared only in very controlled news conferences. Security had to be doubled at her apartment complex until the excitement faded, but it did, in time.

This hadn’t stymied the press for long. They had simply invented everything they needed, based upon the bits and pieces they were able to collect. The stories they came up with varied dramatically, depending entirely on who was selling them. And who was buying.

Trikru media focused almost exclusively on the mutants. Their senior pundits pulled long faces as they tried to unpack the potential meaning, or threat, posed by the open alliance between the human mutants and Queen Nia. What attention they had to spare was spent worrying about the tentative warming between Azgeda and the Republic of Arcadia. There was almost no discussion of the Cefodemorta and her trials or torture at the hands of Cage Wallace, or of the remnants of Montovetero-in-exile.

Azgedan journalists initially focused on the importance of the Royal Fleet in bringing the crisis on Najemo to a happy – from their perspective – and successful conclusion. House Azgeda got all the credit for stepping up to undo a centuries old injustice, for punishing the last of Montovetero for their overreach, and for accomplishing the remarkable feat of removing and resettling so many people with so little, relatively speaking, bloodshed or trauma.

After a few intrepid Azgedan reporters finally reached Mecha and discovered the stories of ‘Roan the Hunter’, the mysterious doings of Prince Roan moved into greater prominence. The connections between Roan and Una, headwoman of the mutants on Najemo, plus a reexamination of Roan’s dramatic role in bringing Bellamy and the mutant rescue squad to Najemo, all triggered speculation that his banishment had never been ‘real.’ That he’d been involved the whole time in a secret mission to expand the influence and power of House Azgeda.

That he was confirmed to be back on active military duty, and with a promotion, was widely regarded as proof of this theory. His romantic relationship with the UIS observer and, as reporters on Mecha had learned, brilliant station mechanic and engine designer, Raven Reyes, who had ended up in the middle of everything herself, appeared to be still further confirmation of the conspiracy.

Arcadian media outlets had ultimately settled on a version that featured Clarke as the hero. According to this account, their Cefodemorta had been working with Una to make peace with the Heda, but then after the talks between Una and the Heda failed on the eve of the disrupted Trikru Melee, her arch nemesis Cage Wallace had waylaid her. Wallace put Clarke on trial, and she riveted the galaxy with her determination not to break under his torture. Una and Bellamy had come to Clarke’s rescue, with some minor assistance from Prince Roan of House Azgeda. Bellamy had killed Cage Wallace after a brilliant duel, and had then invited Una to rule Najemo in his stead. The roles of Queen Nia, or the Royal Fleet, were nearly eliminated in these reports.

This version – with a dramatic romance and rescue at the heart of it, plus Bellamy’s now quite famous speech defending Arcadia – had become so popular, inside and outside the Republic of Arcadia, that there was a ‘based on true events’ vid in the works, aiming for galaxy-wide release in just a few more months. A swashbuckling romance, featuring second and third tier performers as the star-crossed lovers at the center of the tale, working together to save Una’s people while being pursued by Cage Wallace’s cackling mad villain. Though Una was now named Maurice and was a typically gross caricature of human mutants as sexually voracious hermaphrodites.

Raven had recently been deeply relieved, if just the tiniest bit miffed, to learn she and Roan had been cut entirely from the vid script. They’d been deemed too inconsequential to the main story. She’d considered asking Roan if he, or the Palace, or the Fleet, had played any part in getting them erased from the project. But then she’d decided it didn’t matter.

The one element none of the stories contained, and by conscious design, was any link between Raven’s injury and the grander narratives.

In the first confusing days on Sanaero, after Raven had been woken from the cryosleep and had begun her treatment, the four of them, herself, Roan, Clarke and Bellamy, had realized they all needed to be telling the same story about how she got hurt, and that it should not be the full, unvarnished truth.

The very first day they could Roan and Clarke had essentially kidnapped Raven from the hospital. They’d received permission from her doctors for an ‘airing’ on the hospital grounds, but as soon as they were out of sight of the building, they’d hurriedly bundled her into a ground car and hightailed it to meet up with Bellamy in a windswept beachfront park.

Raven had thought the remote spot was beautiful for about ten minutes. Just long enough for the cool spring wind to sink into her station-bred bones, deep into her aching hip. She’d spent the rest of their meeting sitting between Roan’s legs with his arms wrapped around her, shivering each time a stray breeze found it’s way through the layers of every spare item of clothing the rest of them had offered up.

Raven’s chattering teeth had reminded them all why they were there. Her injury was the one big thing that could disrupt their stories and rip apart their united front. Spelled out bluntly, which Roan had been very happy to do, it reflected really, really badly on Bellamy.

“You abducted her off Mecha. You interrogated her using enhanced techniques widely condemned by any number of intergalactic commissions. Your man Murphy shot her in the back, with a pulsar, at close range, inside your own facility. Then you withheld the nerve regeneration therapy that would have immediately mitigated the effects. And now Raven will have to deal with nerve damage for the rest of her life.”

Raven, huddled into Roan’s chest, had checked her first impulse to leap to Bellamy’s defense. Yes, Clarke really had been in mortal danger, and from multiple enemies. Bellamy had rescued her. The outcomes were largely to be celebrated. None of that made what had happened to Raven, directly or indirectly, at his hands okay.

After a long grim silence, Bellamy and Clarke had talked over each other in their rush to fall on their respective swords and take full responsibility for Raven’s injury. It would have destroyed Clarke’s reputation and stood a good chance of landing Bellamy in prison, but they both stoutly insisted it was the right thing to do.

Their combined nobility was a little sickening. She’d told them both to stuff it.

Roan wasn’t any help. Despite his very real empathy for the hard choices Bellamy had faced, he was also still very pissed. Being at the hospital, learning the full extent of the damage, beginning to grapple with the impossibility of a significant recovery, had done nothing to improve his attitude. He blamed Bellamy entirely for Raven’s current predicament. In his opinion, Bellamy standing up, admitting everything, and taking the fall, was a perfectly acceptable option. He’d been confident he’d be able to manage the fallout in such a way as to not damage any of the things he cared about.

Raven had vehemently disagreed. If Bellamy stood up and told the truth, it would strain the relationship between the UIS and Arcadia. It would inevitably dredge up the fact that Roan shot Bellamy’s scout ship all the hell up. Which in turn would threaten the tentative accords between Arcadia and Azgeda the diplomats were currently working hard to create. And it would completely undermine Bellamy’s new role as the hero of Najemo, while resurrecting the ‘Butcher of Semet Province’ epithet now that it had finally, mostly, been laid aside.

“So?” Roan had shrugged, and pulled her closer. “He hurt you.”

“I appreciate your support, there, Alpha Dog,” Raven had said, not fighting his embrace, but not giving in either. “But I think preserving the relationship between the UIS and Arcadia is way more important. And it’s not like Bellamy going to prison would fix my leg.”

Roan had conceded, not especially gracefully, that this was true, and had agreed that the diplomatic relationships were worth preserving. But when he’d had to carry Raven back to the ground car, because they’d brought no cane or crutch and she was too cold and stiff to move on her own, he’d nearly reconsidered. Raven, cold and aching and at the end of her endurance, had snapped that it wasn’t about him, and that he should get the fuck over himself.

Clarke had decided to stay with Bellamy at the beach, and Raven and Roan had driven back to the hospital in angry silence.

“Will he stick to our story?” Clarke had asked the next day, poking her head through the door when Raven yelled that it was open.

“Yeah. He apologized. He’s just frustrated. He can’t simply will me better, or order the doctors to fix the unfixable.”

Clarke had looked around somewhat apprehensively. “Is he here?”

“No. Some officer buddy of Bellamy’s invited him to a boxing gym. Which is great. He needs to beat on things for a while. Maybe get his ass kicked.”

Clarke had laughed a little ruefully.

“So,” Raven had asked, fluttering her eyelashes suggestively, “how was your date with Bellamy?”

Clarke had blushed prettily, and ducked. “It wasn’t a date. We’re friends.”

Raven had sighed dramatically. “What did you two do after his majesty the dickhead drove me back to the hospital?”

Clarke had wandered over to the window, preferring to look at the parking lot rather than face Raven. “We went for coffee, and then we picked up some takeout and talked most of the night at my mom’s place. No reporters there yet, so it’s pretty peaceful.”

Raven had groaned and dramatically slapped her forehead. “That, you ridiculous person, is a date.”

By the time Bellamy and the Casisto had left orbit, Clarke was still denying they were dating.

Given the not-nearly-as-secret-as-they-seemed-to-believe handholding, the sitting smushed together, the shared giggling, the finishing of each other’s sentences, and the near constant eye-fucking, Raven had declined to believe her.

* * * *

“I arrived on Mecha Station a few days ago,” Nikita was confiding to the camera, “and today, we’re visiting with Ms. Reyes here in her lovely home, and I want to thank you again for making us feel so welcome!”

While the cameras panned around the room, Raven nearly choked. Everyone in the galaxy was going to think she had selected the appalling items on display. That she would ever actually chose a fuchsia couch with interesting arms. An incredibly hideous fuchsia couch that had all the comfort of a molded plastic park bench. And grossly violated Roan’s only request when she selected their actual couch, which was that it would be a good place to fuck.

Which, okay, it now occurred to her that perhaps it was better that the rest of the galaxy think she would pick out such a hideous and libido-killing piece of furniture rather than take one good look at her actual couch and immediately understand its appeal.

Suddenly feeling much more positive about all the staging, she remembered to smile and stammer out the line she’d rehearsed about a million times with Cartwright. “You’re welcome, Nikita. It’s a pleasure to have you here. And please call me Raven.”

“Let’s start right at the top, Raven,” Nikita smiled encouragingly. “What are UIS Neutral Observers? Can you tell us a little about them, and what they do?”

Raven launched into the spiel, lifted directly from the UIS manual, heavily quoting the protocols, and dwelling on the benefits for requesting parties. She’d asked, only half-joking, if Cartwright wanted her to hold up a sign with the contact information of the Office of Neutral Observers. Cartwright, not joking, told her the information would appear periodically on the screen and at the end of the program.

“And how did you come to serve as an Observer?”

“It was basically a fluke, Nikita. And I’ve learned in talking with other UIS Observers, that’s pretty common. Most of us come initially to the role by accident, by being in the right place at the right time.”

“And you? What place and time brought you into the service of the UIS?”

“I was assisting Captain Blake as he searched for Clarke Griffin. When we learned that she was in Tondisi, a guest of the Heda, Captain Blake asked if the UIS would formalize my presence as a Neutral Observer. He thought having an Observer with him would strengthen his appeal when he sought permission to visit the city. He was right. Without a UIS Observer, without me, I don’t think we would have been allowed down to Polis. But accompanied by a UIS Observer, he was able to land and we spoke with Clarke.”

“And Major Roan kom Nia,” Nikita prompted. “You were looking for him, weren’t you?”

“Yes. That’s why I was with Captain Blake. He was looking for Clarke, I was hoping to find Roan.”

“In fact, Blake interrogated you, looking for information leading to the whereabouts of the Cefodemorta, yes? Under the – correct, we now know – impression that she was travelling with Roan kom Nia?”

“Yes.”

“And you received a life-altering injury about that time, as well?”

Raven nodded, and spun the story the way they’d agreed all those months ago on a windy lakeshore outside Sanaero. “It didn’t have anything to do with the interrogation, but yes, I was injured pretty badly. There was a pulsar accident. One discharged at close range. I sustained some permanent nerve damage from the blast. I limp a little, now, when I walk.”

“Were you able to make contact with Major kom Nia, in Tondisi, in your role as a UIS Observer?”

“Yes. He was there, too, as you know, and we were able to speak with him. Then of course, the gas main in Tondisi blew up the very next morning. We were able to offer both Clarke and Roan safe passage off the planet.” Raven was sure this lie had to be gagging the Trikru by now, but they’d started it. She was just a ride-along.

“Which is when you were abducted by Cage Wallace!”

“Yes. Well. A few days later. It all sounds so crazy now. It turns out Wallace had a whole network of people ready to alert him if Clarke ever passed through one of the hubs closest to Najemo. By accident, we did. And so yes, the last vessel of the Montoveterian fleet stopped the ship carrying Clarke and myself back to Sanaero. Wallace was very pleased to have a UIS observer fall into his hands, along with the Cefodemorta, of course. He felt it added to the legitimacy of his actions. So my second stint as an Observer began, quite literally, at gunpoint.”

“His actions in carrying you both off to Najemo, and the show trial accusing the Cefodemorta of crimes against humanity, absolutely riveted the galaxy. What was it like as you sat and watched Wallace torture Clarke Griffin, as she refused to answer the charges, day after day after day?”

“It was more horrible than anything I could have ever imagined. But it was also my duty. To witness and record that, whatever their motives, Wallace and the other judges followed their own rules and procedures when it came to charging Clarke. I can’t speak to jurisdiction of course, but on Najemo the process was as fair and transparent as Montovetero had to offer.”

“Keep them honest?”

“By their own standards.”

“Did you have any time to reflect while it was happening?”

“No. It’s an all-consuming task, and you hardly have time or energy left at the end of the day to focus on the larger perspective. That all comes much later as you write your reports and debrief with other UIS observers.”

“And what happens to those reports?”

Raven explained the archival process, and then finished up her long form advertisement for the UIS observer program with a bright smile. “It’s an important and valuable function. To be the ‘eyes and ears of history.’ We believe, and we believe the evidence supports this, that being watched encourages people to follow their own rules. And to live up to their best selves.”

Even, as with Cage Wallace, if their best selves were still ginormous assholes. He had been the very best asshole he was capable of being while running the show trial on Najemo under the watchful gaze of a UIS observer. Raven did not say this part out loud.

Nikita turned to the camera, “This is very true. We have collected so many testimonials about the value an observer can offer, and we will be sharing those later in the program. But now,” and she turned back to Raven, “We’d all like to learn a little bit more about you, Raven!”

At that point Raven was stuck listening, an increasingly fake grin plastered on her frozen face, as Nikita gushed about Raven’s accomplishments. Nikita tossed out words and phrases like ‘brilliant’ and ‘genius’ and ‘best student I ever had’ and ‘destined for greatness,’ all culled from interviews with former teachers and classmates and coworkers. Raven was usually pretty happy to receive all the accolades she was due, but being invited to react as praise was quoted back to her was awkward as all hell.

Raven snuck another look at Roan. He was standing directly behind the cameras, where she could see him. Cartwright stood next to him, nodding encouragingly. Roan had avoided being interviewed. Said it had to be cleared with the fleet, and they’d said no. Everyone had pretended to believe this was the Fleet Admiral’s decision, and not Roan’s choice to keep all the focus on Raven and the UIS, with himself in the background. He met her eyes, winked and blew her an exaggerated kiss. Her struggle not to laugh helped restore her sense of the absurd.

“And you accomplished all this while overcoming true adversity in the form of a very difficult childhood.” Nikita adopted an appropriately sympathetic expression. “Raven, how old were you when you became a legally emancipated minor?”

Raven smiled through gritted teeth and barreled through a quick exchange about how she’d overcome the trauma of growing up the child of an addict, her early and successful bid for status as an emancipated minor, and then they were back to zero-g and station maintenance.

“Explain that for our planet-based viewers!” Nikita invited with a smile, pivoting them away from Raven’s early personal life, exactly as agreed.

Raven explained station care and upkeep in a segment she knew would be sliced all to hell because no one but other station mechanics would ever care. Ship repair came next. Which took them to Roan. Again. Because the chat host was from Azgeda and this was the first crack the press had had at the heir’s girlfriend, and Nikita was going to make the very most of it.

“Would you share the story of how you met Roan kom Nia with us?” Nikita’s smile was just the polite side of avid.

Raven obliged. She didn’t even roll her eyes, though she thought the story was pretty boring and the chat host was being ridiculous. Raven was fully aware of the kind of stories Nikita would have heard about Roan and herself on the station, and none of them involved anything resembling a ‘meet cute.’

Raven said, “He needed work done on his ship. He brought it into our shop. I asked for his repair ticket because I’d always wanted to work on a real Prowler, and not just the knock-offs that are all over the edge.”

“It was really all about his ship?” Nikita was coyly disbelieving.

Raven laughed, “Yes. It was really about his Prowler. I saw it waiting when I clocked in. True Prowlers are expensive and hard find, and it’s quite rare to see one out this way. I didn’t even met Roan until I was showing him the work I’d done afterwards. But he did ask me out, and I liked him fine, too.”

He hadn’t asked her out so much as let her know where he’d be drinking. She hadn’t met him there so much as she’d wandered in to see how he’d react. An hour later she’d been impressed enough by what he’d managed up against a wall in a tiny restroom of a skanky bar near the freight bay that she’d challenged him to do better. In her bed. He’d accepted.

He’d come straight back to Mecha, and to her, the next time he needed a repair on his prowler.

“When did you learn he was the missing heir to House Azgeda?”

“Not long before everyone else did.” Which was a lie, of course, but one that preserved the most dignity all around.

“Did that upset you? That you didn’t know for several years?”

“Yes, at first.” She couldn’t help it. She looked at Roan again. He offered her a very small contrite shrug. Raven drew her eyes back to Nikita. “But at the same time, I understand his choice. If he’d told me he was the heir to House Azgeda when we first met, I would totally have done the ‘back slowly away from the crazy person’ thing. Who expects a missing prince to pull up into your repair shop on the edge of the galaxy?”

“That does sound unlikely!”

“So he waited to tell me until I’d believe him, and not panic, or run around betraying his confidence.”

“Did it change anything?”

“Between him and me? No. He’s exactly the same person I’ve always known. But around us? Yeah. Pretty much everything. You wouldn’t be here, talking to me, without that. For example.”

Nikita insisted she would, and then finally asked the concluding question, “Would you serve as a Neutral Observer again?”

“Yes.” Raven faced the camera squarely for this one, and spoke as firmly as she knew how. “But only when I think I could make a difference. Our belief is that people act their best selves when they know they’re being watched by history. Who the watcher is shouldn’t make any difference. Here on Mecha, we have one of the best repair and salvage operations in the Coriolis Arm. I think I do better by working here, on the ships that come through, and on the station itself, than I could by doing a task that can be done well by many other people.”

* * * *

Raven walked into their living area, toweling off her hair. The interview was long over. The crew had taken away the stage set, except for the star-scape screen that got to stay in front of her worktable, and returned their actual furniture and belongings. Everything was mostly in the right spot, and she’d fix the rest later. The final hour-long program would be broadcast in a few more weeks. After everyone involved gave their approval to the final cut.

Roan was sprawled on the sofa, their low-backed comfortably-brown sofa, watching some sort of sport ball thing on the screen with the volume turned way down. He looked up when he heard her.

"Hey," he smiled, as he scooted over to make room for her and held up his arm, "you look more like yourself."

She tossed the towel on another chair and dropped down, snuggling into his side. "My normal paint-free self, you mean?"

"Yes. Her. The one I can kiss."

"Yeah?" She raised her brow. "Prove it."

He did. Thoroughly. She twisted and slid her leg the rest of the way across his thighs to crawl over him and into his lap, never breaking their kiss. He swept his hands up under her long tee-shirt, and then pulled away to murmur, “You aren’t wearing pants.”

“No,” she said, shivering as his fingers drifted over the sensitive skin of her waist. “I’m not.”

He smiled up into her eyes, “You’re still demanding.”

She pointed out, “I’m still the one on top.”

“For now,” he agreed, his blue eyes glinting with a mix of good humor and flaring desire.

She bent her head to kiss him again.

His clothes soon followed her shirt onto the floor, and he rolled them until he was on top. His tongue followed his hands, and then his cock followed his tongue, and she arched and writhed and begged and cursed until he stopped her lips with his own, and kissed her breathless, both of them gasping by the time her orgasm rose and then crashed through her, pulling him along in her wake.

Afterward, tucked between him and the back of the couch, a light blanket covering her naked ass as her skin cooled down, she traced the lines of his chest with her fingers and said, “You really have to leave tomorrow?

“I took a week off already. I’m on the edge of becoming a problem for the service.”

He meant he’d taken way too much leave already in the last nine months, and almost all of it had to do with her. He’d been back on duty all of four days when he left to take her Sanaero. He’d visited her regularly there, and then taken more time when they moved. He’d been on duty three weeks on, one week off since then, in theory anyway. It never seemed to work out that way in practice. Something always came up, on one end or the other. It wasn’t working, no matter how much he tried.

Recognizing that it wasn’t working, he’d twice attempted to resign. He’d been rebuffed each time, first by the Fleet Admiral and then directly by his mother. So Raven was reasonably confident that the fleet just had to deal. But that didn’t mean the other soldiers liked it very much, and that did bother Roan quite a bit.

“I thought your new detached assignment was supposed to help?” she said.

The Fleet Admiral had finally accepted that it was all but impossible for Roan to settle back into the military hierarchy or to a standard duty tour. He’d become too accustomed to running his own life and had grown impatient with the kind of restrictions regular duty imposed. And between Raven and his mother’s need to send him places as her representative, he kept getting dragged away from it anyway. So he’d finally been switched from command of a Special Forces unit, one he’d rarely been able to stay with for more than two weeks at a time, and over to the office of the Fleet Admiral.

“It will. If I actually get back to it. Which means I have to leave in the morning.”

“But this time you’ll be back in three weeks, right?”

“Well…” he drifted to a pause, and concentrated on playing with her fingers, pressing them flat across his heart.

“Well, what?” Raven asked after his pause got too long.

“How would you feel about meeting me in Azgeda instead? At Morningstar Hub?”

Morningstar Hub was in the same system as the capital planet. It was also not exactly the bad news about fewer, more widely-spaced visits that she’d suddenly feared he was going to drop on her.

“Why?”

“Your hover designs. The chief engineer from the Uralze convinced the fleet design office to consider installing them the next time they retrofit the prowler wing.”

“Really?” Raven pushed herself up far enough to get a good look at Roan’s face.

“Yes. Really. Your thrusters held the prowler balanced on the edge of a building, despite the wicked updrafts and in the middle of a firefight. They’re really good.”

As she realized he was completely serious, and that the Royal Fleet was interested in her redesigned hover thrusters for all their prowlers, she started to grin. This was the stuff mechanical engineering grad students dreamed of, in late night chat sessions as they faced yet another round of math sets.

“When did you learn about this?” she asked, suddenly very suspicious about the timing of this news.

“Little more than a week ago. I thought I should let the interview pass before I talked it over with you.”

She thought about this for a minute or two while Roan just watched her. Finally she said, “Military contracts, huh?”

He broke into a slow grin, and nodding said, “Yes. If that’s how you wanted to play it. You should ask around. Get advice. Let me find you a law firm that specializes in that.”

She looked around her, at all her carefully chosen books and plants and pictures and art, and at the big window, with the curtains drawn now that it was station night in the atrium outside, and her heart pinched, just a little tiny bit. “An Azgedan law firm. In Azgeda.”

“In Azgeda.” He must have caught her change in mood, because he raised her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “You don’t have to decide anything soon, military contracting is a slow business.”

She nodded and forced a smile that quickly turned real. It was fantastically cool, after all. “They’re really interested? In my designs?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t they be? Your designs are brilliant and so are you.” He shifted under her, dropping his leg to the floor. “Let me up. We should celebrate your success. I’ll go open a bottle of wine.”

He scooped up his trousers as he walked away, so she put her tee shirt back on and pulled the blanket into a rough wrap skirt. She was sitting up when he reappeared, wearing pants but barefoot and shirtless, carrying an open bottle and two glasses.

As he handed her a glass of wine, he said, as though it were a casual addition to something they’d just been talking about, “And, while we’re there, my mother is hoping you’d be willing to finally meet her in person. She’d like it very much if you’d do her the honor of attending her birthday celebration next month.”

Roan raised his glass, "To the brilliant Raven Reyes."

Nia’s invitation still ringing in her ears Raven raised her glass and accepted the toast out of habit as much as anything else. A birthday party. For a fucking Queen.

Then she took a long, slow sip of what she quickly realized was one of the few wines she'd ever actually told Roan she liked. She took a second sip and savored it, rolling it on her tongue as she cocked her head to regard the smug-looking man preening in front of her. She was going to say yes to everything, because how could she not? And he already knew it. She raised her eyebrow and said, "You are a sneaky, manipulative bastard. You know that, right?"

"Yes." He smiled winningly at her. "But I'm really hot. And you really like my Prowler."