Challenged (Mates for the Raskarrans #8)

Chapter 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Angie

O nce I start, it’s difficult to stop.

“It just doesn’t make any sense. Mercenia came here to start a breeding program, and it would seem they weren’t successful because they didn’t come back. But they have to have been successful, because Sally and the others have or are having children. But if whatever Mercenia did worked, how is it that Sally and the others are affected by it?”

The words I wrote on the table shine up at me.

Genetic Engineering.

It’s the only possible answer, but it invites a new question - how?

“I would understand if I got pregnant, or Brooks. They could have done anything to us while we were frozen. But Sally crash landed here. I could believe that Liv’s crash was deliberate - a group of bottom tier women dumped on an alien planet to see what happened. But Sally told me the circumstances of her arrival here. It sounds like it was actually a crash landing. Even Mercenia doesn’t go as far as killing people to make a scenario realistic.”

Dr Novak might have faked a few deaths for his experiments, but they were always undertaken in places that Mercenia had complete control of. Teams of people and lots of tech were used to make any ‘deaths’ look authentic. In an alien wilderness, attacked by the wildlife - there’s just no way a production team could have made that happen.

“But even if they did crash Sally here deliberately, she still didn’t have any sort of treatment before she left. Neither did Liv, or any of the others. It’s not like Mercenia could have slipped them a few pills and not told them what they were, either. Making a human compatible with a raskarran - it must take some pretty intense genetic engineering. You guys never met any humans before them, right? So you can’t have been treated. It has to be them. But even if, somehow, the treatment was completely painless and didn’t have any side effects, they would have needed careful monitoring, lots of check ups. Tests to make sure it actually worked. None of them experienced anything like that. So they can’t have been treated. Yet there are three healthy half-human, half-raskarran kids already born. More on the way.”

I push a hand through my hair.

“And if Mercenia didn’t genetically engineer any of the girls to breed with aliens, I guess I’m supposed to believe it’s just a coincidence that two different ships crashed here. And maybe it could be, you know? Ten years is a long time. If you think of the path from home to this Alpha Colony like a road - the volume of traffic on it, the average condition of the vehicles, the skill of the drivers, the amount of time - maybe it’s about right that there have been two crashes. Maybe there have been even more that we don’t know about. It just doesn’t sit right with me. None of this does. It just…”

“It does not make any sense,” Rardek says, nodding.

I shrug. “So I tried looking on Farrow’s computer. There’s so much stuff on there, I thought for sure I’d be able to find something that gave me some clues as to how all of this is possible. A report from the science tier teams - they had to be reporting to him.”

“And did you find anything?”

I scoff. “All sorts. Menus for the canteen, risk assessments, inventory lists. Just nothing that’s any fucking use.”

Rardek considers this for a moment. “A list of supplies they had might be of some use. If you know what tools a person has, you can guess at their purpose.”

His thoughtfulness defuses my irritation some, though it’s nothing I hadn’t thought of myself.

“A lot of it I don’t know what it is. The particular scientific equipment - most of it is just listed under company names and serial numbers. I’d need a catalogue to work it out, and I couldn’t find one of those. Most of the rest of it is generic - stuff with so many different uses, I could never narrow it down. And then some of it is just weird. Like they packed full protective gear. Nuclear level PPE. What would they need that for out here?” I grimace. “I mean, it would have been really useful to them when the disease started spreading. But they can’t have anticipated needing it for that, so what else?”

Rardek says nothing. At least he doesn’t fall into that guy trap of trying to look like he understands everything better than anyone else.

“The most frustrating part is I feel like the answers I’m looking for are in there somewhere. I’m just not seeing it.”

I rub at my face, my neck. The strain from sitting at a computer for so long hasn’t followed me into the dreamspace, but the action is automatic. Still, despite the aches I know I’ll wake up to, the lack of progress I’ve made, I do feel strangely better for saying it all. For having someone listen, even if they can’t offer any answers.

I’ve never had someone listen to me before.

“You have more time yet,” Rardek says. “Two females were woken today while Rachel and Grace learned the process of using the pods. There are sixteen still to be woken. Perhaps they manage more than two tomorrow, but I doubt it will be all sixteen. You can keep looking.”

“I can.”

But to what end? Is knowing the answers to this mystery going to fundamentally change anything about the life I have now? Or is this search just me holding on to a part of the life I’ve lost? Doing my job one last time, because once we leave here, I’m never going to do it again.

My job. Hah.

Baxter’s job.

You’ll pay for this, you little bitch. I will make you pay.

Baxter, in all his disheveled fury, flashes before my mind’s eye again. Except it’s not just my mind’s eye. He walks out of his office - a room tucked off the side of this one. Exactly as he looked that day - tie loose, shirt untucked, pulsing vein on his forehead, his face bright red.

“How could you do this to me?” he spits, charging forward.

I didn’t flinch then; I don’t flinch now. But Rardek is in front of me in a moment, a wicked-looking knife appearing in his hand. Baxter looks right through him, as though he isn’t there.

Because he wasn’t. This isn’t the real Baxter, just a memory.

“It’s okay,” I say, taking Rardek by the arm and guiding him back. “Not real, remember?”

I don’t know if it’s my touch or my calm that gets through to him, but he straightens out of his defensive pose, the knife vanishing.

“I sense that this was real to you once,” he says, his tone strangely clipped.

Baxter continues to breathe hard, but otherwise he doesn’t move. Frozen, waiting for permission to continue playing the memory out.

“Yeah, meet my boss, Andreas Baxter.”

“Was he always this angry?” Again, his voice sounds wrong. Like he’s trying to hold his own anger in.

“No, only this once.”

“You’ll pay for this, you little bitch. I will make you pay.” Baxter says it without moving, just stands in place and repeats that line that has echoed in my ears ever since.

“Pay for what?” Rardek says.

“Humiliating him.” I step closer to Baxter, really look at him. He was always lazy, arrogant, but I thought he had something redeeming to him. A charm. Looking at him now - admittedly at his worst - he just looks greasy. A five o’clock shadow on his jaw. Food stains on his collar. Such a charisma vacuum his anger doesn’t even frighten me.

“I was supposed to be his assistant,” I say. “Make him cups of coffee and bring him things. Do his errands. Remind him to buy an anniversary present for his wife. That sort of thing. He realised pretty quickly that I was smart enough to help him out with some of his actual work responsibilities. I didn’t mind doing it - far more interesting than the rest of the stuff he had me doing. And when I did it well, he gave me more things to do. Again and again until I was basically doing his job for him. I was bored enough at first that I didn’t resent it. Na?ve enough to think that maybe I’d get credit for it one day. If I worked hard enough, did a good enough job. Never happened. I just watched Baxter taking credit and getting rewarded for everything I did.”

It still burns in my chest. To me, it’s still like it all happened yesterday. Seeing Baxter all fury and humiliation - it’s as satisfying now as it was then.

“There was this one job. It was complicated, and I thought I knew what the answers were, but I figured I’d run it past Baxter before I got him to sign it off. Just double check that what I was saying really represented his views, you know? I was trying to do the right thing. Should have known better. I barely said two words to him and I could see his attention starting to wander.”

The scene shifts before us to Baxter in his office, fiddling with some desk toy. He looks up at me, exasperated. Almost pitying.

“Can’t you do anything by yourself?”

The patronising tone in his voice makes me seethe all over again.

Rardek’s eyes flash. “You had been doing his work by yourself all that time. He was happy to take your rewards, but not to provide you assistance?”

The quiet anger he feels on my behalf buoys me.

“Yeah. Everything I did for him and he still treated me like a brainless idiot. So I went back to the work I was doing, and I changed it. Did it like I was a brainless idiot. He signed it off without looking. The worst piece of work ever produced by our department, and it had his name on the front of it.”

I grin at Rardek, expecting to see my expression returned. Instead, he looks troubled, his hand coming up to touch my face.

“He might be a lazy, stupid individual, but I believe what he said about making you pay.”

There’s a tension in him, a tightness in his shoulders and expression, as though he’s afraid of what I might say next.

“I thought he’d hit me,” I say. “Was prepared for that. But instead…”

I rub at the faded bruise on my neck, the scene around us changing once more to the street. Baxter’s ambush. We watch it play out - another version of me trying to run in her stupid heels, Baxter catching her, slamming the needle in and the plunger down. It fades away as she slips into unconsciousness. Then we’re back in the office.

“Woke up nineteen years later,” I say, trying to hide the tremor in my hands. The tremble in my voice.

“My Angie.” Rardek’s voice is rough with sorrow, and he reaches for me, but stops short of touching me. I’m grateful for it. Rub at my neck again.

I really don’t want to be touched right now.

“You know what the worst part about it is, though?” I say, my voice twisting and cracking. “I found a ‘specimens’ list on Farrow’s computer. My name was on it. My full name.”

Angelita Ramirez. I didn’t know Baxter even knew that was my name.

“Them knowing your full name is the worst part?” Rardek’s eyebrows twitch upwards, as if he’s trying to contain his disbelief.

“The thing is - it shouldn’t have been possible. He shouldn’t have been able to just attack me in the street. Drug me and hand me over to be part of this experiment without consequence.” My voice goes higher, louder. “You can’t just remove a person from their life. Not a person like me, anyway.” I wince as I say it. “I figured Baxter must have handed me over to someone, given them a false name. Made out like I was someone else. Someone more… disposable.”

Rardek reaches for me again, and this time he does touch me, his big hands closing round mine, warm and slightly rough. Working hands. So much sexier than the soft, pampered hands I’ve spent my life shaking.

“I know when you say these things, you mean only how Mercenia thinks, not that you also think in those ways.”

His gaze is soft, sincere. Unflinching. I find myself drawn into those yellow eyes, as if I could fall into them. Drown in their depths.

“You give me more credit than I deserve.”

“You would not be so uncomfortable to say it if you believed it to be true.”

His tone is firm. Certain. And it’s nice. Really nice. Having someone believe I’m better than I am for a change.

“I thought he must have lied,” I say, my voice hoarse now. “But there was my name, in full, on the specimens list. He didn’t lie because he didn’t have to. He wasn’t afraid of his actions having any negative consequences. He treated me like I was nothing with impunity. That’s how worthless I was to Mercenia all along.”

Rardek shakes his head. “Be glad, then, that you are stuck here. Because you could never be worthless to me.”

My blood warms at his words, but I pull my hand back, trying to massage out the echo of his touch.

“Because I’m the only person who can bear you children?”

His brows furrow. “Liv and the others have spoken to you about the fullness of how mates work?”

“It came up in our conversation about how half-human, half-raskarran babies are possible.”

He sighs, then looks around the room. In a moment, the office is gone, replaced by a large, billowing tent. A central pole holds it up, and scattered on the floor is a pile of thick, soft furs. I squeak as Rardek scoops me up, setting me down on them. He takes a moment to fluff up the furs, arrange them better for my comfort, then takes a seat himself a short distance away.

“Of course I will welcome any younglings we have with great joy, but do not think for a moment that this is your only worth to me, my Angie,” he says, his voice heated, but not in an angry way.

In a way that makes my throat go dry.

“You are my linasha, my mate. We will spend the rest of our days together, and all our nights also. I would not want to do that with someone I did not admire, that I did not enjoy. That I did not value.”

He shifts, leaning closer, his voice going low. Urgent. “I do admire you, my Angie. I do enjoy you. And I most certainly do value you. I would consider it my greatest failing if I ever made you feel otherwise.”

I’m stunned by the force of his words - by the force of his need for me to understand. Heat boils in my chest. My pulse throbs, need pulsing through me in time with my heartbeat. My eyes are glued to his mouth. The curve of his soft, full lips.

“You still don’t know me,” I protest, my voice sounding weak, breathy to my ears.

He inclines his head, and like a piece of glass shattering, all the intensity and heat is gone in an instant, replaced once more by the devilish grin.

“It is true,” he says. “There are some terrible gaps in my knowledge of you. For instance, you have not told me your full name.”

I could get serious whiplash from this guy.

“My full name?”

“Well, I assume it is not just Angie?”

I shake my head in disbelief. “Uh, no. It’s Angelita. But no one has called me that since my last Screening.”

“Angelita.” He draws out every syllable, wrapping heat around each one. “It is pretty. Why do you not use it?”

“Too much of a mouthful. It’s a family name. My grandmothers. Her grandmothers before her, and so on. Means something in a long dead language. Little angel.”

I wonder if raskarrans have a concept of angels, whether whatever it is the dreamspace does to make us understand each other can translate. Then he grins again, his eyes sparking with mirth.

“It does not fit you so well, does it?”

Despite this being entirely true, I scowl - further proving his point. Rardek just laughs. Great big laughs. His whole body shakes with them. It makes it impossible to be annoyed with him, and I find myself laughing too.

“That’s always been my problem - bad at being good.”

He leans closer to me, touching a hand to my leg, thumb stroking over my ankle. Hardly an intimate touch, but I feel it in all sorts of intimate places.

“I do not see this as a problem,” he says.

I lean back a little, try to create some room to breathe before he steals all the oxygen from my lungs.

“You might if you knew more about me.”

His hand creeps higher up my leg, moving to cup the back of my knee. The fact that he stops there almost makes me groan.

“Tell me your worst,” he says, a challenge in his eyes.

I think of all the times I’ve lost my temper. The affairs that didn’t last because I was too difficult. The other petty revenges I got on people before Baxter.

“I failed my Screening.”

The words blurt out of me.

“You will have to do better than that to shock me.” He lowers his head, his face close to my leg. Close enough that if he moved just a little, he could press his lips to the inside of my thigh.

“It’s a test. All girls on white collar tiers are tested. For their suitability to be wives, mothers.”

He looks up at me then, snapping through most of the heat that had been building between us.

“Humans have a test for such things?”

“Yeah. And I failed it. They didn’t think I would make a good wife or mother, so they put me on career path instead of family path. That’s why I ended up working for Baxter.”

“It sounds like a terrible test to me. How could it ever account for every individual personality? Lorna makes Shemza very happy, for example, but I would not have liked her in my dreams.” He shoots me a grin. “Far too nice.”

I’m about to pretend to be irritated by the implication of this when he continues.

“Is that why you failed it on purpose?”

“Wh… What?” I choke the words out, surprise making my throat tight.

I think maybe my mother guessed this. Maybe. She never outright asked me, but there were little things she said from time to time - before she stopped speaking to me altogether - that gave me the impression she knew. But she knew me all my life. Fifteen years of knowing who I am. What I’m like.

Rardek has known me a day.

“How did you know?”

He gives me a slow, heated smile, leaning close enough that it would only take the tiniest movement to close the gap. Kiss him.

“My Angie, if I have learned only one thing about you, it is this. You are clever enough that if there was a test you wished to pass, you would have done so.”

My heart pounds so hard in my ears, I’m surprised I can still hear him. But his words sink through my racing pulse. Settle somewhere in my soul.

“I didn’t like any of the guys that might have been my husband. I didn’t want to be trapped with one of them.”

“You did not want to have no choice.”

He speaks the words that were about to come out of my mouth.

“You… you really get me. Don’t you?”

“I am glad you think so.”

He grins at me again. A slow, arrogant expression. But there is warmth, joy, humour behind it. A teasing glint in his eyes.

Fuck it, I think. I’m going to kiss him.

But then he draws back, something that might be regret shaping his features for a moment.

“I am sorry to end this discussion,” he says. “But time in the dreamspace is a fickle thing. Sometimes it takes a long time here for a moment to pass in the waking world. Sometimes a moment here is actually a very long time. I do not know how much longer we have, and I would very much like to speak on something with you.”

“Okay,” I say, his shift in tone making me feel almost nervous.

“I have my own troublesome problem,” he says. “My own set of questions that I cannot find answers to. Might I tell you of them? I would dearly like to know your thoughts.”