Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Angie

A s Rardek walks out of the room, he leaves a storm of emotions behind in me. Embarrassment, anger, amusement and that dangerous heat that starts the moment I look at him and only builds when he grins at me, turning into an inferno when he laughs.

I should hate him. I’ve always hated arrogant men, and every inch of his seven foot plus frame is full of arrogance. But apparently it’s only a turn off when it isn’t paired with a sense of humour. And both times I’ve snapped at him, put him down, he’s just laughed, as if delighted.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what Sally said to him. How she changed the shape of my words to make them more palatable. But the glitter in his eyes when he grinned at me suggests he knew exactly what I said, even if Sally did change it up a bit.

It’s like he can see straight through into the heart of who I am and it’s extremely…

Unsettling. Unnerving.

Attractive.

I realise I’ve been standing there, silently staring after him for a ridiculous stretch of time. The colour in my cheeks deepens and I brace myself as I turn back to Liv, Brooks and Sally.

All three of them are smiling at me, knowing looks in their eyes.

“He’s not going to leave me alone, is he?” I say, hoping I sound at least a little exasperated, like there’s no part of me going back to that moment in the showers, right before I pulled his tail.

Picturing the water trickling down over his perfectly muscled back and ass.

“No,” Liv says. “And you already don’t want him to.”

I try to bristle, but can’t summon any real strength of feeling behind it.

“I don’t like having choices made for me,” I say - about the strongest protest I can manage while my stomach is still swirling from his proximity a moment ago.

“And you’ll find you’re not the only one who feels that way around here,” Liv says. “We know it’s…”

“Really fucking weird?” I suggest.

Liv barks a laugh. “Yes. Really fucking weird. When I first had the dreams, I figured they weren’t real. Just a little fantasy I’d cooked up. So I was, er, all in with it. You can imagine my shock when Gregar turned up at our crash site a few days later.”

“Same for me,” Sally says, blushing lightly. “Thought they were just dreams, but then Jaskry rescued me.”

“And then you’ve got this guy whose declarations of devotion were hot when they were just a fantasy, but now they’re way too intense,” Liv says. “You’re not sure if you’re ready for it, if it’s what you even want.”

“But part of you is responding to it anyway,” Brooks says. “Part of you feels all light and fluttery when he looks at you like you’re the most precious thing in the universe. Even as your human sensibilities are telling you it’s too much, too soon.”

“We’ve all been there,” Liv says. “We all get it. You want to talk about it - any of it, without shame or judgement - then we’re here. But we’ll also all tell you how disgustingly happy we are, and that might not be what you want to hear right now.”

“You all seem so sure that I’ll be part of the disgustingly happy crew before too long. Rardek included.”

Liv nods. “And I know how irritating it is to be told how you’re going to feel. But none of the mated pairs that have formed so far have been unhappy. I don’t expect you’ll break that pattern if you’re prepared to give it even half a chance.”

There’s a hint of challenge in her tone. Not enough to piss me off, but it’s there, poking at me softly.

“But there’s a way out of it, right? If I decide I don’t want to give it a chance?”

I know the answer before I even ask. A goddess chosen mate bond isn’t exactly the sort of thing you get out of. But still, when Sally shakes her head - even though she does it with kindness and empathy in her eyes - it’s like a little knife sliding in between my ribs.

“Once the dreamspace forms, that’s it. Distance or injury or illness might stop it for a few nights, but as long as both parties are well and close enough to each other, it will continue to form every night.”

So going home is my only way out of it. And going home is looking less and less like a viable option, whether I can get in touch with Mercenia or not.

“It’s not the human way of doing things,” Liv says, her voice gentle, persuasive again. “But are human ways always great? Lorna had a husband three times her age picked for her by her parents.”

“I would have had a military tier guy selected for me based on our genetics to have the best chance of producing good offspring,” Brooks adds with a shrug.

“And for us, marriage and children were illegal,” Sally says, gesturing at herself and Liv. “How did it work on your tier?”

She doesn’t ask it like a ‘gotcha’, but it’s exactly the right question to undermine me.

“We were Screened for suitability,” I say, and the disgust the process still makes me feel creeps into my voice. “If we passed, we were moved into the family path and trained to be good wives. The rest of us were put on the career path. No husbands, just lessons in touch typing and taking meeting minutes. Admin stuff. So the real brains of the company didn’t have to bother with it.”

“The men?” Liv’s tone is so disparaging, it makes me laugh. But then she gives me a piercing sort of look. “And you want to go back to that?”

The spectre of the beginning of our conversation looms over us. They all look at me, their expressions different, but all equally invested in my answer.

“Look,” I say, taking a breath before facing her. “I’m not going to lie and say I magically want to stay here now. But also, contrary to what my behaviour might suggest, I’m not a monster. You’re absolutely right. If Mercenia comes back here, they will take your children, and I’m not going to be a party to that.”

Liv nods, the motion a little stiff, as if she doesn’t quite trust me. I can’t blame her for that.

Fortunately, Marsal chooses that moment to start squirming and fussing. I’d almost forgotten the little one was there, and the reminder only makes me think again of how her existence should have been impossible.

“Why don’t you take Brooks out to meet Rachel and Grace,” Liv says to Sally. “They should be nearly done with unpacking and settling in by now.” She turns to Brooks. “When you’re ready, come back down with Shemza, and we’ll get started opening up the next pods.”

“Dawes?” Brooks says.

Liv grimaces. “Tempting, but I don’t know. Maybe it would be better if we got Rachel and Grace up to speed with the process on someone else. We can discuss it when we’re ready to start, anyway.”

Brooks nods, then she and Sally, and a now squalling Marsal, head out of the computer room. Liv turns back to me, and I’m expecting her to give me some warning or ultimatum. Instead, she nods at the clothes in my hand.

“You should get changed. You’ll be a lot more comfortable. Especially if you ever decide to come outside and meet everyone.”

There’s a light note of judgement in her tone.

“This kind of environment is a bit more my speed,” I say, gesturing at the computers around us.

But I pull off the stiff, scratchy t-shirt I’m wearing and replace it with the raskarran blouse. It’s massively too big, much like the nightgown, hanging almost to my knees. The trousers are no better - I think I could fit half of me again inside them - but with a bit of creative tucking in and a belt tied round my waist, I don’t feel like I’m going to be flashing my underwear to everyone every time I move.

“One of the girls back at the village was a seamstress,” Liv says, folding up the clothes I was wearing as I pull my new boots back on. “There might be a bit of a queue, but she’ll get everything fitting you better. You won’t have to feel like you’re wearing a tent forever.”

“Wish I had a practical skill like that,” I say. “Hardly an asset to the tribe, am I? Don’t think anyone needs their calendar keeping out here.”

She gives me a sympathetic sort of smile. “I destroyed contraband for a living, so I feel you. They didn’t even teach us to set the fires we were using to burn books, so it’s not like I could even put that on my ‘forest survival skills’ resume.”

“Waste disposal?” I say, confusion rippling through me. “But that’s…”

“Bottom tier gutter trash work?” Liv says, her voice hard enough to cut diamond.

I wince, wishing I could go back a day, start the whole process of waking up again and not be a total dick about it. There’s really no way to apologise for being such a shitty human being, but I do my best.

“I’m sorry. It was an inexcusably awful thing to say. I was frightened and angry and I still should have known better. Because I fucking hate it when people talk about me like that.”

“They called you gutter trash?” Liv arches a brow.

“No, they called me stupid, vapid, ugly. Not as evocative, but it all amounts to the same thing - worthless. I know none of that stuff was true about me. I should have known it wasn’t true about bottom tier people either.” I grimace. “Not that it being true would have been any excuse for slinging insults around.”

Liv’s quiet for a moment, but when she talks her voice is level, no anger in it.

“I sometimes think that’s why Mercenia keeps us in tiers. So we never see beyond our own problems.” Her dark eyes cut to me, assessing me. After a moment, she nods, apparently satisfied with whatever she’s seen. “You were lashing out. We didn’t deserve it, but you didn’t deserve what happened to you either, so let’s just move on and put it behind us.”

I’m not sure I deserve that level of grace either, but I’ll take it. Gladly.

“Thank you.”

Then, to my surprise, she grins.

“You really want to thank me?” she says. “I think maybe there is something you can do with that skill set of yours.”

Back in the manager’s office, I re-enter the password and load up the machine again. With all the pop-ups dealt with, it goes significantly quicker.

“What do you want to know?” I ask, picking up the paper diary and turning through it until I find an unused notes page. There are all sorts of pens in the pile of mess from the upturned draw, but I rifle through until I find a pencil.

Liv takes a deep breath. “How difficult do you think it would be to figure out when the Mercenia team abandoned this place?”

“Uh, down to an exact date? Probably tricky. But a ballpark one?”

I set down my pencil and open the diary at the front. Like most diaries, there are pages of nonsense at the beginning. I skip past them to the year at a glance page, but it isn’t filled in.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I figure if I understand when and why they left, I might feel more certain they aren’t ever going to come back.”

I can understand why that idea would play on her mind.

“I last remember it being February, the year before this diary covers,” I say. “But it presumably would have taken Mercenia some time to go from kidnapping me to loading me up on a spaceship. Then Brooks remembers being here for a period of time, right?”

“About six months, she thinks,” Liv says. “Time was a little difficult to keep track of when she was here, but she left around April, thinks it was probably October time when she was frozen. Again, the year before that diary covers.”

“So they were here at least another couple of months for D Farrow to have moved into this diary.”

I hit the first day by day pages. Fortunately, these are filled in - meeting reminders, to-do lists and notes all written out across the pages in scrappy handwriting.

“Busy in January,” I say.

I skip forward to the next month, and then the next, on and on until I reach September. At the beginning of the month, there’s still plenty in the diary, but when I turn over to October, the pages are blank.

“There we go then,” I say, flicking back from October, looking for the last entry in the diary. “They came here nineteen years ago, and were gone less than two years later. That’s… not a lot of time for a research project of this scale.”

The funding, the work it would have taken to get this place set up - transporting the materials, the equipment across the stars. Building the base, setting it up inside. Then the food, the supplies, the power network, never mind the cryostasis pods and the training for the people coming here, their salaries, hazard pay, etc. etc. It doesn’t make any sense that it would be abandoned so soon.

“Something must have gone wrong,” I say.

“What makes you say that?” Liv’s voice is sharp.

“All the funding they must have poured into this place to get it set up - it doesn’t seem right that the team would only be out here for eighteen or so months.”

“You said the experiment wasn’t viable.”

“I said that when I thought you were pregnant by someone you met before you arrived here. You’re having hybrid children.” There’s still so much I don’t understand about how exactly that’s possible, but I ignore that for now. “The experiment worked. So why did they suddenly leave?” I turn to her. “Seventeen years is a long time to be gone, though. A lifetime in scientific research. The chances that they’ve forgotten about this place and the breeding program they were trying to start here are excellent.”

I’m expecting her to look reassured, but her expression only darkens.

“What?” I say, my heart rate climbing.

Liv’s eyes cut to the door, then back to me. “Raskarrans don’t count their days the way we do, but Sally has been here long enough to know that a raskarran ‘year’ is near as makes no difference the same as a year back home. Seventeen years ago, a plague swept through the raskarran populace, killing almost all of them.”

“You think Mercenia caused it?”

“They were leaving right around the time all the raskarrans were dying. That seems like a very large coincidence to me. Too large. I wondered at first if they were experimenting with diseases. Biological warfare type stuff. But then Brooks said about the breeding program, and it doesn’t seem likely to me that they would be doing both.”

“No. They often combine stuff when the objectives are complementary, or at least don’t work at cross purposes. But trying to create life and trying to destroy it at the same time - that’s really unlikely.”

“So they brought an illness with them? Something one of the team was infected with that spread into the raskarran population.”

“They would have had protocols to prevent that. Isolation periods. How long did the journey out here take?”

“A couple of months.”

“I’m not an expert by any means, but that sounds like long enough to eliminate the possibility of anyone being contagious with anything.”

“So I’m supposed to believe there’s no cause and effect between the sickness and Mercenia leaving?” The scepticism in her tone is thick.

“No, I think you’re right. It’s too large a coincidence to be unrelated. My guess would be the illness originated here and the research team was concerned about interspecies transmission in the other direction.”

“Really?”

“Forgive my crudeness, but even if this illness killed most of the raskarrans, it didn’t kill all of them. There would have been enough left behind to continue the experiment. A single male raskarran could have fathered hundreds of children. I don’t know how many they would have needed to ensure future generations of half human, half raskarran children weren’t too inbred, but I bet it wasn’t many. How many are in your tribe?”

“About fifty.”

“Two or three tribes of a similar size would probably be enough. If the illness originated in the human population, they wouldn’t have any cause to fear it. They would have stayed. Carried on.”

“But if it came from within the raskarran population and they were afraid they might catch it…”

“It would certainly explain why they didn’t pack up their stuff when they went. Why they left me and the others behind.”

She doesn’t look entirely convinced, but after a moment, she nods. “Okay. That’s all reassuring, but I’d still feel better if we knew for certain that’s what happened. Do you think that’s something you’ll be able to find?”

I turn to the computer. The sea of files on Farrow’s desktop tells me he wasn’t exactly a tidy computer user. Will the information be there? Maybe. But will I be able to find it?

“I’ll do my best.”

She nods, pushing to her feet. She moves slowly, like her joints and muscles have set while we’ve been sitting here talking, heading for the door.

I turn to the computer, go to click on one of the files, but one last warning message pops onto the screen, an error sound playing.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Liv says, turning back.

“Depends on your perspective,” I say, squeezing the words out of my suddenly thick throat.

She comes back round to the screen. I thought bottom tier people weren’t taught to read, but clearly she can, because she breathes a sigh of relief at the words that are now framed at the centre of the computer screen. The words that have doomed any chance I might have had to send out a message. If I even wanted to anymore.

Unable to establish network connection.