Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3) Read online

  Eesh. “Okay, well, in case you hadn’t noticed, clearly I don’t have your missing tech on me right now.” She held out her arms to both sides to demonstrate her lack of pockets.

  The other Cretarni leaped back, drawing their weapons.

  “Put your hands down,” Cinek snapped. “If you fire, we will kill you where you stand.”

  Because of her zaps. She was the stolen weapon.

  Slowly, she deflated, wrapping her arms around herself and tucking her hands under her arms. It took longer for the soldiers to relax, and none of them holstered their weapons.

  Although technically she couldn’t holster herself either, so maybe she shouldn’t blame them.

  Oh, but she blamed them.

  “Your ancestors did this to mine,” she whispered. “I never wanted this, never asked for power. You made me a monster.”

  Whatever tension had left the soldiers swept back in like a returning tide. And for once, she welcomed the simmering fear and hatred that flooded through her like a toxic drug. If they wanted her zaps…

  “No.” Cinek’s rejection made her pause. “I told you already. The Tritonans stole the technology, but it was the Tritonesse who converted it to a biogen weapon and deliberately infected their own. They are the ones who poisoned your blood.”

  She wanted to stay mad, but that sounded exactly like the Tritonesse, the ones who’d created Titanyri like Sting to wage their war. Her own moment of malevolence faded, leaving only a stain of shame.

  “Then they killed all of your kind,” Cinek continued inexorably. “Because even the Tritonesse spumers knew fire-witches were too dangerous. But one of your ancestors escaped on the exodus ship. And now…here you are.”

  “Here on your ship,” she said warily. “Because you are taking me away.”

  “No,” he said again. “On your ship. Where I will take away this power you say you don’t want.”

  The sound reached her first: the ever-present hush of waves. In another few steps—the Cretarni soldiers lurking behind—they exited the nondescript corridor to a balcony overlooking the spire and wheel at the heart of the Atlantyri.

  For a shocked moment, she gazed down the long drop to the churning waters below and swallowed hard. “What are we doing here?”

  They’d known that the Cretarni had tricked them into finding the Atlantyri and that the Tritonans’ old enemies must’ve had reasons, but they’d never figured out why. Now she knew: they’d been searching for her.

  Or not her exactly, but the weapon she was.

  “We knew the Tritonans had sent away some of their most precious belonging on the exodus ship,” he said. “So we suspected they would’ve sent weapons as well. It wasn’t until recently, when we started receiving information from the Intergenetic Data Agency, that we realized there was a fire-witch.” His dull orangish gaze settled on her. “You.”

  How ironic that submitting her own genetic information to Marisol’s study to find a cure for Wavercrest syndrome had resulted in making her situation even worse. She was no longer just a danger to herself or a few of those closest to her. No, she was a weapon against an entire world.

  “This is terrible,” she whispered. “I didn’t know…”

  “It shouldn’t be your burden,” Cinek said. “This wasn’t your war.” His voice took on a mesmerizing cadence. “I brought you here not to take you away, but to take away the power you say you never wanted. I can make you what you thought you were—an unsuspecting Earther, no fire, no connection to some distant alien world, no more the monster.”

  She swayed on her feet, her eyes half closing at the promise he was holding out. Hadn’t she said exactly this, that she wanted no part of the war, that she didn’t want to be where she wasn’t wanted in return? And now these old enemies of the ones who’d declared her cursed were offering her a chance to take back the life she’d never really had. A chance to be…

  “How?” she asked hoarsely. “How will you get the power out of me?”

  “The progressions that the ship uses to keep the water purified here should work to separate the biogenic components from your blood, leaving only your Earther heritage behind.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Should?”

  Cinek showed all his teeth again, and she suspected that this time he was attempting an Earther smile. And he wasn’t any better at it than Sting was. “It is more than the Tritonesse offered you, yes?”

  He wasn’t wrong about that. She stared down hard at the water circulating through the spokes of the huge wheel as it had done for centuries hidden away down here. She felt almost as battered as those imaginary shores, almost as forgotten.

  Because in the end, she’d never had anyone save her. Yes, her mother had returned, and maybe Sting hadn’t left yet, but they couldn’t fix what the Tritonesse had started. No one could.

  Except this Cretarni, or so he said.

  She kept her gaze on the waters. “And if I say no?”

  “Remember the inferno we dropped upon your dwelling?’

  She jerked her head in a nod, trying not to picture her mother huddled under the piano, Thomas somewhere downstairs, their spilled drinks catching fire.

  “That is what I will do to your little village, to as much of this little planet as I can reach. And then I will take what I need from you anyway.” Cinek pointed three of his seven fingers toward the spire. “The purifying progressions are kept there. Will you go willingly, fire-witch, or will you fight? And lose.”

  All the times she’d told Sting to forget the war. And here she was.

  “I’ll go,” she whispered. “What choice do I have?”

  “None. You never had a choice, not with the switch in your bones.”

  Her body and mind seemed as frozen as her bare toes as Cinek led the way through the Atlantyri to the spire. It was a lot of steps to descend from the outer wall, through dry walkways since the Cretarni couldn’t breathe underwater, heading for the center. Sting would’ve just held her close and dived…

  But he wasn’t here, was he?

  As numb as she was with cold and fear, that thought still speared her. She’d always been on her own, so why should that hurt so much?

  Instead of going up in the spire, they went down. She hadn’t even realized the depths at which the Atlantyri was embedded in the local terrain. No wonder it had never been found until a trio of Wavercrest women tried to find the answers to their strange symptoms.

  Cinek gestured her through a doorway to a large room. To her shock, another handful of Cretarni were waiting, though these individuals were not armed or armored.

  The new bunch were dressed in featureless pale gray, like doctors or researchers. Or maybe off-brand torturers. One of them, taller than the others and with lighter colored feather-fur, gestured to her. “Lie down here,” the Cretarni said in a higher pitched voice that made Lana think female, although there were no other identifying characteristics.

  Reluctantly, she turned her attention to the makeshift exam table. It was really just some plasteel crates shoved together, not even the same height. Which way did she want her back bending uncomfortably? Moving slowly, but not so slowly that they might accuse her of delaying, she sat down on the low box. “What are you going to do to me?”

  While the taller Cretarni shuttled between the comm panel on the wall and a freestanding, mobile station that looked like a heavy-duty laptop except with a high-tech heads-up holographic display, one of the other gray-suited Cretarni answered into the tense silence. “That flow there? Marks the recirculation and purification of the water keeping the ship alive. We rerouted a portion of the circuitry to handle the much lower volume of your blood flow.”

  Lana eyed the gauges. Though her universal translator gave her the technical meaning of the gauge labels she had no idea what it actually meant. Except she didn’t need any sort of advanced degree to know that the rush of water through the ship was millions of times greater than her short self. “How do I know you’re not just going to drain
all my blood to power your weapon?”

  The tall Cretarni swiveled, showing those seven sharp teeth. “We could,” she hoot-hissed. “Unfortunately the spumers, when they stole our tech, broke down the elements to embed them within biogenetic components—like within your body. We’ve lost the precious and rare resources to rebuild from scratch, so we’ll have to comb your blood for what we need.” The stiff short feathers around her face and ruff flared wide, pupils pinning aggressively. “The Tritonesse accused us of war crimes when they were the ones who infected their own people with weaponized tech, making them walking weapons.”

  “Swimming and diving weapons, actually,” piped up the smaller gray-coated Cretarni. “Allegedly, their Abyssa demanded that weapons of mass destruction should be embedded within the deepest hearts of their warriors, so that no weapon would be used without a true awareness for the cost of such warring.”

  The tall Cretarni clicked her teeth. “The Abyssa is a myth that the vicious ruling matriarchs used to keep their gullible populace in line. And none of those spumers have wit or conscience.”

  “And their hearts are as dark and shrunken as the tiny grotesqueries that lurk in their trenches.” Cinek loomed over Lana. “Now lie down, and the doctor will purge the monster from your blood.”

  Still she hesitated. There was no more time for Sting to save her.

  Did she even want him to?

  The smaller Cretarni held up one seven-fingered hand in front of her, and she flinched away to avoid it touching her. “It will be over soon,” the Cretarni whispered. “And it shouldn’t hurt—much. You’ll feel a little sleepy, maybe lightheaded, as the purification process separates the switch components from your system. If you want a sedative—”

  “No.” Lana shuddered at the thought. Not that she could stop them, probably, if they tried.

  Unless she used the zaps she’d told herself she wanted to be rid of. She’d always felt abandoned, on her own, but was she this time betraying herself?

  She’d waited too long to claim her power. Before she could make some other choice—although what it might’ve been, she wasn’t sure, besides premeditated violence—the doctor latched a manacle around her upper arm and in the very next motion set a second band around her neck. Simultaneously, needles bit deep, and she gritted her teeth against an inadvertent cry.

  Although what was the point of being strong now? The hot rush of adrenaline made her skin itch, but in the next moment, a cool flush ran through her, leaving the tang of saltwater on the back of her tongue.

  Oh god, were they actually circulating the Atlantyri waters through her veins? Her vision dimmed and wavered, so she had to partly close her eyes or feel like she was sliding off the crates. Maybe they were just draining her like a sinkful of dirty dishes.

  Through the prison bars of her lashes, she watched Cinek staring down at her. “How long will this take?”

  The doctor sucked at her egg tooth with a sharp-pointed tongue. “How should I know when we’ve never done this before?”

  “We’ve never defeated the Tritonans either, but that doesn’t stop the high dominion from demanding status reports.”

  With a hiss-hoot that sounded like a curse, the doctor clamped another band around Lana’s other arm. “Half the time now.”

  Cinek paced a circle around the crate-table. “Don’t kill the switch. This truly is our last chance against the scumming spumers.”

  Over by the laptop display, the smaller Cretarni waved one hand. “It’s working! The switch components are titrating, little by little. We just need time.”

  “Don’t have much of that either,” Cinek said. “Closed-world security has obviously been lax on this planet, but if they catch the aftermath of our run on the house, they’ll be forced to come after us.”

  Lana’s head whirled. It wasn’t the slack planetary security the Cretarni needed to worry about…

  Unless she was still fooling herself, just as she always had.

  If the Cretarni took her zaps, she could go back to her old life. Maybe she’d even be welcome on Tritona. But the Cretarni were going to destroy Tritona… She’d wasted her moment of choice on fear, and let others—first the Tritonesse, then the Cretarni—talk her into running away. Again.

  Without conscious thought, she surged up against the manacles. There wasn’t much slack but for once she was glad of being small because she managed to get her hands to the strap of needles around her throat while curling away from the desperate reach of seven-fingered Cretarni hands. Tearing at the collar was like ripping away a necklace of leeches, and blood spurted.

  If she died, they couldn’t keep taking the components to murder a planet, could they? The fatalism gave her a reckless strength.

  Maybe this was why Sting kept fighting.

  With a scream and a wild, errant pulse of sonics that broke across three octaves, she heaved away from the manacles and the grasping finger-claws. She got one bare foot braced on the decking, gathering herself for a zap—

  The Cretarni doctor lunged forward with a trident and speared Lana through the heart.

  Or it felt like that anyway. Another scream wrenched from her, no power this time, only pain, as the prongs of the trident splayed outward across her chest and released a countershock.

  The zap she’d conjured crackled in blue-white spiders across her skin and flared up the trident.

  The doctor leaned hard into the trident, shoving Lana back to the crates as the power flowed out of her. A fist-sized bulb at the other end of the spear glowed electric blue.

  As if Lana was nothing more than a damned battery charger.

  The tines of the trident ripped at her pajamas as she squirmed like a gaffed fish. The smaller Cretarni jumped closer to thrust a syringe against her neck, and in one frantic heartbeat, her vision shrank to nothing more than the doctor’s dull orange glare.

  “Is this what you wanted?” The Cretarni’s hiss-hoot was mostly hiss now, her egg tooth jutting much too close to Lana’s face. “You could’ve just given us what we needed”—she twisted the trident—“quietly and we would’ve left you on this wretched, ignorant world, pretending this was all a bad dream.”

  “Run away,” Lana whispered.

  “You could’ve, when we were done with you. Yes, your heart would’ve failed eventually without the necessary electrical charge to power your muscles, but until then you could’ve lived your miserable, half-scummer life however you liked. But no, you had to fight. And for what?”

  “Enough.” Cinek pushed the doctor back and reattached the needle collar. “Ask no questions for which your own answers would scatter like ash. Get this done so we can leave.”

  Lana let her head loll, and through her tunnel vision, she focused on the trident that the doctor set aside with one last disgruntled hoot. Somehow, the lightning rod device had focused the zap into the bulb. But the rod hadn’t drained her, or they wouldn’t need to use the needles now. If she could grab the lightning rod herself…

  But her arms felt as heavy and cold as river rocks, even without the needled bands, and the one around her neck was making her thoughts equally inert. She’d donated blood before and never felt this paralyzed. Maybe if she rolled off the crates toward the rod? Rolled like a rock… Ugh, she was being stupid. The Cretarni soldiers were right there, and now even the little one could stop her with, like, three of his seven fingers.

  Every being in the universe had more power than her, it seemed. And she was losing what little she had—erratic and frightening, yes, but the zaps had been all hers—because she’d been too afraid, too weak to make the power her own.

  Loathing gurgled through her, colder than the draining of her blood. She didn’t deserve the power.

  But Tritona didn’t deserve to die.

  If there was only one way to stop this…

  She couldn’t hold her breath to kill herself, not when what little Tritonan heritage she could claim would keep her blood oxygenated long enough for the Cretarni to do whatever the
y wanted before she died—or revived, whichever was worse. Despair was like a second tidal wave behind the loathing; she was going to be the death of Tritona, just as the Tritonesse had dreaded.

  With everything she had left, she tried to summon the zaps one more time. Her nerves sizzled, the power running under her skin like fireworks…

  “Components are coming faster now,” the smaller Cretarni announced. “Maybe this won’t take long at all.”

  Just her luck, summoning the zaps was only helping her captors. Like a sparkler plunged into a bucket, her power fizzled out.

  And so did her consciousness.

  ***

  When she revived again, she knew this time they were in space.

  How did she know? The little empty room where she’d been tossed—still in her ripped pajamas—had the same look as the Atlantyri broom closet, but there was a strange, subliminal hollow hum all around her.

  She’d been abducted by aliens for real.

  No point in pretending to still be unconscious. That hadn’t really worked out for her last time either, and she was done making the same mistakes over and over again.

  Rolling upright, she hugged her knees—the center of her chest still aching from the trident bruises—and flexed her muscles until the chill had left her skin. Stiffly, she got to her feet and marched in place then added jumping jacks until her blood was moving.

  How much of her blood was left anyway? Streaks of red marred both her wrists and the skin between her breasts, dripping down from her neck, where the needled shackles had pierced her. Fury guttered through her arteries and shame backwashed in her veins, as if to make up for the lost blood volume. The Cretarni had defeated her while barely lifting a seven-fingered hand.

  She swore under her puffing breath, but her hatred of jumping jacks would have to stand in until her righteous rage at being abducted found a worthy outlet.

  Catching her breath, she stilled in the center of the little room and closed her eyes, reaching inward for that place where the power had been.

  Even more nothingness than was outside this spaceship.