Chapter 14:
The hall was packed. A whole fleet of small ships had carried in pleasure seekers from all corners of the galaxy, and they had credits to spend and a willingness to be parted from them.
Clara’s mind was not on the game. Her mood was low and her body tired. Her mind wandered, a dangerous thing, but she could not stop it from moving restlessly as she dealt and smiled and played hand after hand.
She won enough and was smart enough to fold when the pot was growing too large and the stakes too high. As she surveyed yet another bad hand, she found herself admitting that folding was her best bet, and not just on that hand.
On Renall.
How dare he offer to make her his mistress? How dare he even assume that that was all she would want from him, or that his argument that that was the most logical thing to do would hold weight?
I should have slapped his head right off his shoulders, she fumed as she laid her cards on the table to show she was out. She kept just enough of her attention on the game to deal well and to keep the table lively. Outwardly, she was calm and laughing and fun. Inside, she was furious and still shaken by the day’s events.
Lois’ death had been awful, but she had seen much worse. She had even seen people much closer to her than Lois was die, and badly. But something about the whole thing made her even angrier than ever.
Her government. It was so wrong, and yet it held all the power. That was unfair. Her attention was diverted away from all those thoughts by the sight of a Terestrial taking a seat at her table. Her ire notched upward. She waited until the hand was done to speak. She leaned across the table, eyes focused on the loathsome creature.
She said, “Listen to me. I have been skull scraped once and if you even act like you are about to open your mouth to do that, I’ll annihilate you. I mean it. Don’t even breathe at a high pitch.”
The creature gave her a wounded look, but she was not fooled. More than one of his kind had thrown a tantrum that resulted in the injury of both dealers and patrons, and their own death. Not only was she not fooled, she was unamused at the idea of adding a skull scraping to her already shitty day.
The creature settled in. The in bet was a hundred credits. The game began. Clara kept a wary eye on it, grateful to have something else to focus on. She finally managed to get her attention solidly into the moment and to actually enjoy the play again.
The pot grew with each flip of the cards. A few rubes bought in on the next hand, and one of them was a fumbler.
Clara spotted that instantly. She looked around the table, wondering if anyone else had noticed or recognized what he was.
She regarded him carefully. Definitely human. Definitely a fumbler.
He seemed vaguely familiar as well, though she could have sworn she had never seen his face before. She studied his features more carefully, a frown trying to erupt between her brows as she did so. He looked up and caught her eyes. She deliberately relaxed the muscles of her face, not letting any emotion other than a pleasant smile mar her face.
A fumbler was a player who faked being inexperienced and overeager. Some played the role in too heavy-handed a way. Not this man. He was adept at it. He was also incredibly subtle. Clara had to admit she was impressed. She ran a small bluff and watched his face carefully, and his body too. It was easy to see he was watching her in return, and learning her style way too fast even as he lost the third hand he had set into in a row.
Clara hadn’t survived so many years of illegal carding by not knowing when she was being summed up, and so she deliberately began to insert small tells here and there. Tiny. Unnoticed by the other players.
He began to show a few as well. She didn’t believe a single one of them were real. Or were they? Perhaps he was starting to show his nerves as well. Or letting his real tells show because he knew she was making his con in the hopes that when they showed later, she would think them a bluff.
The game ended. The man she’d been watching so carefully won the small pot. The others began to drift off, but he stayed on. Fresh players came and went. The hours passed. Her body began to cramp. The pots got bigger. She won three out of ten. He took two. Very modest pots, but an advantage.
Clara was enjoying the skills she was seeing in him. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that he was just what he seemed to be: a very lucky novice. That nagging sense of familiarity kept creeping up on her. Eventually, they were the only players at the table. The others had gone in search of bigger pots and less savvy opponents. Clara leaned across the table, her eyes searching the man’s face. “I know you’re faking it. You are no beginner.”
His eyes didn’t shy away from hers. “I know you do. Father would be disappointed to know that you were fooled by a fumbler.”
His voice changed as he spoke. Clara’s mouth sagged open. Her eyes blinked rapidly. Her heart stood still. Her mouth formed one word. “Joshua?”
He smiled. “It’s me, sis.”
Oh! Her hands stilled and flew upward. She dropped them quickly, her gaze shooting across the room. Nobody was paying attention, but that didn’t mean they would continue to ignore her and the table. She whispered, “How?”
Joshua, her brother, said, “Father and I managed to bribe a guard. He left a door open for three seconds, which was all we needed. We escaped and meant to go to the side Mother was in, but we could not get that far before we were spotted. We had to run for it.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “You had a genetic lift and facial surgery.”
He nodded. His mouth was flat and grim. “I did. We both did. We had to go to the Lower and take the stash. Luckily nobody had discovered it.”
“Black market?” her eyes were wide. “That’s…you could have died.”
They could have. Black market genetic lifts were dangerous, and it was not uncommon for those who got them to die from the transfusions. Many black market genticers used whatever material was left over in their lines, and they weren’t shy about mixing it into people whose own genetics would not match what they were injecting.
Joshua’s smile was lethal. “We could have, if we had not gone to the house of a geneticer who owed a rather large house debt and was in the unsavory position of either having to sell a son or go to the government work tanks.”
She licked her dry lips. “How did you get here?’
Joshua said, “We used our contacts to find out you had been put on a ship. Then we heard about a body smuggler who had been paid to get Mother out, and where he brought her. We got here two days ago. We managed to get into the cryo room. She’s in there, on the list, but we didn’t see her.”
Clara swallowed hard. “I know. I have not yet finished paying her passage. As soon as I do, I get the key to her cryo.”
Joshua’s jaw tautened. “I have a better idea.”
Her gut clenched. “You do?”
He nodded. “Nobody knows who we are here. You could set up the tables and send the pots my way. We could use the credits I have now and take the house, hard. Same with Father. We would be able to get Mother and run. Get out of here and head somewhere else. I hear there are hundreds of planets like this one out there.”
It was a good plan, but to cheat Renall went against everything she felt for him, even if she knew that what she felt was not and could not be reciprocated by him. She shifted in her seat, her eyes flickering around the room again.
More players were headed for her table. Joshua whispered, “Father and I have a chamber on the fourth. Number twelve. Come talk to us after your shift.”
He laid his cards down. The pot was small. She quickly gathered the cards, saying “You win again, sir.”
He gathered the credits and stood. He spoke in an amused tone. “I think I better not push my luck anymore today.”
He left the table. Clara said, “I am sorry. My shift is over. Give me a moment to clear the table so the other dealer can step in.”
The walls came up around the table. She quickly gathered the remaining credits. She had won much earlier, and even the losses were small thanks to the house cut. Renall would think she had had an off day, and with good reason considering all that had happened before she had had to sit and deal.
The other dealer stepped in as the walls came down again. Clara left the table and then the hall, walking slowly even though she wanted to run. Her father and her brother were there! Her mother was too. Her whole family, all together again.
It should have been a glorious moment, but instead, she was weighted down with the sense of loss that dragged her heart down and her spirits right along with it.
Renall stood in the hall, blocking her way. He said, “I need to speak with you.”
Not this and not now. She sighed. “Why? I think you have said everything you need to say to me.”
“Not everything. I am sorry I asked you to be my mistress. I will admit…” His lips curled downward. “The thing about my race is that we are not given to wed for what you humans call love. I don’t know how to break a pact I made, and what is more, I can’t. I have to have defenses for that planet.”
She said, “I understand why you do. I understand all of it. But that doesn’t make it less painful for me. I don’t want to discuss it either. I just want to go to my chamber now.”
Actually, she wanted to go to Joshua’s chamber. She wanted to see her father and talk of ways to get Megda out of that cryo box and them off Orbitary.
Renall said, “Due to the fact that Federation is greedy and always looking for a fortune to confiscate and the fact that they know how mine and my siblings’ was built, and the simple conclusion that if we do not act now, all will be lost, I have purchased the planet and begun the shipments of things to it. I must go though—and soon.”
Clara asked, “What about the hall?”
Renall sighed. “I already sold it. Everyone has the choice of going to the new ownership or leaving.”
Her heart sank. “Including me.”
His face was so hard to read. Clara stared at him, wishing he would say that he loved her. That he wanted her to go wherever he was off to, but she knew that would not and could not happen. “Yes, even you.”
Her breath stopped in her throat. The aching in her heart got bigger and heavier. “I see.”
He held out a hand. On his palm lay her crypto file and the key to her mother’s cryo- chamber. Her eyes went back to his face, but she still had no idea what it was he wanted from her.
He wanted her to go? Wanted her to stay?
Tears gathered and tried to fall, but she held them back. Her pride would not let her weep in front of him. She could not weep in front of him. The tiny slivers of dignity were all she had left, and there was no way she could give him those too. She had already given him her body and her heart, and she had known better than to do that. She had tasted betrayal before, and she knew, had always known, that when it came to him and that planet he dreamed of, there was no way he would choose her.
How could he choose her over a planet he had spent lifetimes in the pursuit of?
Her trembling fingers plucked the items up and then curled over them. She said, “I still owe you.”
“No. I loosed all the indentureds as well. If they stay here, they do so debt free. The same for the Gurley girls.’
Of course he had. Renall knew slavery and its yoke. He would not run on his slaves or his people. She whispered, “You could take many with you. They would go. They would jump at the chance of populating a new planet.”
“I have agreed to take several. I have a small colony I want to start first. Maybe once things settle and are easily habitable for a larger group of people, I shall try to recruit beings to live there.”
You could ask me to go, but how could I say yes to that knowing you are so near and yet so far from me? That you are wed to another and that you will not ever love me the way that I love you? She swallowed that line of thought and the salty lump in her throat. “Well then. I wish you well.”
“I wish you the same.”
They faced each other, awkward and unsure. Clara wanted to say so many things but why bother? It would do no good to plead her case. She was but a human woman, and he held in his hands the lifetime dream he had been after, and the pact that would help make that happen.
Hurting and blinded by tears she could not afford to let fall, Clara turned and left the room, walking fast—walking away from him. She did not look back. She could not look back. She was horribly afraid that if she did, she would go to her knees and beg him to love her. To be with her. To not throw them away.
But he had thrown them away by not breaking that pact, and by asking her to simply be his mistress. She did not need that in her life. She was not willing to settle for less, and he was not willing to give her any more than that, so there they were at an impasse that saw her having to leave his side, and stay gone, forever.