CHAPTER1
JOLAR
I ambledalong the gray corridor, glancing between the ribs at the cells I could see behind the forcefields. Most were empty but not all; the prisoners tended to be either human mates or Mylos, hauled in for drunken escapades two nights before during a beer festival one of the restaurants had decided to host. The one I was passing now gave me pause. She must have been brought in during my sleep cycle, and the absolute hatred she was leveling at me led me to wonder what she had done.
“Ho, Jolar,” Klora called out, popping out of the guard station set up in the space across from her. “I see you’ve noticed our latest guest, Linda Takahashi. Just ignore her, she’s got quite the mouth on her.”
“You can’t keep me here,” she shrieked. “I’m a citizen of both Earth and the United States!”
Klora simply rolled his eyes and passed me the data pad with today’s prisoner roster. It listed their names, ages, misdemeanors, any pertinent medical information, and what their day would entail. Most of them were probably being released later today, I saw, as they had their tribunals scheduled starting mid-morning. My eyes widened when I saw her crime.
I looked up. “She tried to steal a young for profit?” The idea horrified me.
“Not just any young, either,” Klora said, “but one of ours. He’s Tech Master Braevan’s new brother and ward. She actually tried to accuseusof taking children for nefarious reasons!”
I gasped, stealing a sideways look at the female in the cell.
“Oh, and her husband is missing,” Klora added with relish.
“I can hear you, you know,” she snapped. “And he’s not missing. He’s gone.”
I frowned. That was an odd turn of phrase given the circumstances.
“You’ll be sorry, just you wait! When my lawyer gets the Human Rights Commission on this, heads will roll! All I tried to do was make life easier for those poor boys. Haru is my nephew and as a mother, I know what’s best for him better than anyone.” She crossed her arms and turned away, her perfectly coiffed hair gleaming under the light in her cell. I frowned, trying to determine what color her hair was. Blonde? Gray? Sun-streaked brown? It looked too artful to be natural. I tapped her entry, looking at the rest of her statistics. Ah. There it was. “Hair, brown, heavily treated with chemicals in a process known locally as frosting,” I read aloud.
She was spouting nonsense, of course. For her to be here, her case had to have met certain criteria and for the highest human authorities to have signed her over. Besides, she might have given birth to a young, but it did not mean she had been a fit parent. I knew this personally from my experience with Neal, my six-year-old adopted son. He had been removed from his own mother due to her cruelty and neglect and was now thriving under my own loving care.
“Sachuu will be arriving tomorrow to question her further. The word is he’ll be accompanied by members of the FBI,” Klora said, excitement lacing his every word. He was a fan of human crime shows, and this really must be a dream come true for him, with us being in the middle of something that might later end up dramatized on one of them.
Linda Takahashi walked over to her bunk and sat down. She glared at us, her dark lipstick reminding me of blood. She grinned suddenly, most unpleasantly; more of a baring of the teeth really. Then she began to sing loudly, some song about what she’d do if she had a hammer all over some land. Klora and I looked at each other and hit the mute button. Now the forcefield kept the sound level to a low whisper. She could sing and scream and yell all she wanted, but we’d not hear much of anything.
“She’s going to be a pain in the ass,” Klora said. “Bet you five credits that she’ll throw her food tray at us.”
“I’m not taking that bet,” I said. I wasn’t foolish enough to do so. With the way she was acting? It was almost a certainty.
CHAPTER2
MITCHELL
“So,”the man across the table said to me, “you work at a call center, huh?”
His name was Davis and he was, according to his dating profile, twenty-six and worked at the local Mercedes-Benz dealership. It was our first date after being told we were a possible match, and so far, the only thing I was getting from his wannabe surfer-boy looks was that he thought he was hot and that I was a loser.
“I do,” I replied, hastening to add, “but I’m looking at applying to college to get a nursing degree.”
“Medicine, huh?” He looked mildly impressed and for a brief moment, I thought I’d been judging him too harshly. Only a single moment, mind, as what he said next laid that notion to rest. “If you’re choosing nursing because of the MCAT and long study hours and all that shit, there’s always those schools in the Caribbean. You can enjoy low tuition, the sand and the sea, all that sunshine, and not worry about flunking out because your grades suck. They’ll let you retake classes without kicking you out. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
My jaw dropped. He’d just pretty much suggested I go to a diploma mill somewhere and tarred an entire region’s education system as being merely nothing but fun in the sun, places to go with minor academic requirements for coveted specialist degrees.
“Um, no. I chose nursing because that’s where I feel my calling lies.”
He snorted, then flashed a smile as the waitress came over to take our order. He ordered a triple cheeseburger with fries, coleslaw, an extra side of onion rings and a Coke. She then turned to look at me expectantly and I flashed her a smile back, grateful that we’d agreed to meet at a place I was familiar with so I didn’t have to struggle with the menu.
“Hi, Cindy,” I greeted her.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Mitch. We were awful sorry to hear about your grandmother.”
I inwardly flinched. I wasn’t sorry at all, and that probably made me a terrible person. If I was, then she’d been an even worse one. Sure, she’d raised me, but the smiling, kind-to-strangers act she put on for everyone else had been just that—an act worthy of winning an Oscar. At home, she’d been mean-spirited and verbally abusive. Still, this was where we used to come every Sunday afternoon before I’d take her grocery shopping, and all they knew us as were the kind old granny and her devoted grandson.
