Octavia Girl

Chapter Seventeen

Trading a Diamond for a Cat’s Eye

Misha dolled up Jenna as hard as she could, given that Jenna only gave her half an hour. That meant that Jenna was caked in glitter, dripping with gemstones, and swathed in satin.

“I don’t like this,” Sardius complained as Jenna sat in a chair in front of the camera screen.

“I’m not showing any cleavage or selling myself at auction,” she retorted.

“Really? You could have fooled me,” he snorted.

“We don’t have a lot of options. We need options.”

“I think there’s a very simple solution to this,” he said steadily, putting his hands on his hips and placing himself between her and the camera.

Jenna couldn’t bear to look at his hands resting on his hips. Every square inch of him was too precious to load into a pod only to be hacked apart and eaten as part of some powerplay. Jenna closed her eyes and pushed the idea from her mind. “What’s your idea?”

“I could trade myself for Iker and kill all of them,” he said simply.

Jenna sighed. “Really? That idea seems foolhardy… and crazy.”

Sardius got right up in her face. “Yes. I told you, the way I fight was not well represented when you saw me box in the ring. I could kill everyone on board and whether they do a dimensional shift and take their ship to hell or heaven, it won’t matter because they will have let the danger inside. I’m not the same boy he brought aboard and tortured for kicks because nothing else pleased him. I would enjoy killing him and everyone close to him, which, in a way, makes me worse than him.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Jenna said, licking her lips even though she wasn’t supposed to do that after she had applied lipstick. “What do you think the worst thing Rold could ask of me?”

“Jenna, you misunderstand all of this,” Sardius said with a fire in his eyes that Jenna had never seen before. “This is my past, my mess, my way of life, and my choices that have come back to haunt me. This is not something you have to clean up for me. I always knew that something like this could happen. I chose to come here to see you, to be with you, instead of dealing with my demons.”

Jenna squirmed.

He took hold of her hand, knelt before her, and utterly discarded pretending he was not Sardius. “Do you remember that time you told Favel why you wanted to marry me? You took out your earpiece in an attempt to keep your words a secret from me? You told him that you wanted me as your husband because if I was in prison, no one could ever hurt me. No one could use me against you because what you were doing here was the most important thing. Guess what?”

“You could hear me?” she said, breathing hard through her nose to stop herself from crying and ruining her makeup.

“Yes, but what you said wasn’t a betrayal of me and it wasn’t selfish. I have to make something clear to you. You can’t protect me from suffering.” He said the words with such finality that all the air left Jenna’s lungs. “That was never something that was in your power to do,” he pressed, his eyes looking like muddy clouds covering a moon. “I control the suffering.”

Jenna gasped in her breath. “I… I…”

“I know,” he said, rising and holding her chin so she couldn’t avert her gaze. “What you wanted that day made sense. How can you do your job here if you’re worried about the person who’s dearest to you being threatened? That would paralyze anyone and it was so far-sighted for you to have said that, I was stunned. And it melted my heart! You wanted to protect me? I was the poster boy for the resistance so that other people could scoot under the government’s radar. I was lucky when I was caught and put in prison that they didn’t do worse to me, but someone high up decided to use me as an example of the government’s benevolence and I was not chopped to bits and fed to their warmonger generals. It could have gone a different way.”

Jenna tried to turn away, but Sardius held her tightly and forced her to stay in the moment with him.

“Look,” he said sternly, “if you’re going to do your job here, you can’t go groveling to an arms dealer to protect your bodyguard. That will undermine everything you’re trying to do. I can’t let you do it. You don’t understand yourself. You don’t know what you look like right now. You don’t know how Rold Xant is going to see you or what payment he’s going to ask for. I told you before that I am fascinated by everything you do and I always want to see more of who you are, but I told you before that I’m not special that way. Everyone wants you, including Rold. He’ll want to know everything about you from the way you hold a fluit to how you scream during sex. He’ll want to see you at your most vulnerable, at your most desperate. He’ll love it. I can’t let you go to him and offer him all the things you’ve kept private. I can’t. So, go take your makeup off and get me an appointment to see Brazel at the space station.”

“Why do you need to see her?” Jenna asked, confused.

“Because I need to keep my promise to you and her before I go.”

Jenna gasped. “Are you saying you’re going to get more surgery? You can’t be thinking about that. You’re going to have surgery in your last moments to satisfy your promise to Brazel so she’ll work on Phane? I can’t let you do that. That’s crazy!”

He nodded gravely, then smiled a disarming smile that made Jenna think for a moment that the situation wasn’t as serious as she thought it was. “Don’t get me wrong,” he laughed. “It’s selfish of me to ask, but I can get her to do a few things that will help me when I get aboard Don Leo’s ship. Body modifications are all the rage.”

“Get everyone out of here,” Jenna commanded tightly.

Misha was the only person in the room, and she left quickly while Jenna pulled her earpiece out and threw it across the room. Her feelings were set to explode.

“I can’t,” she whispered, ruining her makeup and plunging her face into her hands. “I can’t put you on a pod and send you to deal with this by yourself.”

“You must,” he insisted. “Nothing in the universe will make you more terrifying faster than doing this. You think you’re going to have a problem negotiating with the AAMC after this? You won’t. You sent your lover to retrieve a diplomat? It’s a full-on move.”

Jenna looked up and scowled at him. “Nothing will have changed for the AAMC. They won’t view my sending you away as a power-play. They’ll think I’m a scared little girl who sent her man to do the dirty work by himself.”

Sardius took her hands in his and steadied them. “You won’t let them think that. Every single time they bully you, you’ll behave like a bulldog and not let them have another word. Even today when you told Denver you’d be more than happy to stall your own program if he could give you a good reason. He doesn’t have one. He has a team of PR people constructing one as we speak. What I’m trying to say is that when I go away, it will change you. It will make you harder. Let it change you.”

“And you really think you can kill everyone on board?” she asked, squirming between his hands.

“Of course, I can,” he said with a smile that belonged to a player who could get any woman in the world to fall in love with him. “When I come back, I swear, we can be lovers openly. No more hiding. Everyone can know who I am and what I’ve done. I’ll be prepared to give you everything that I am and you’ll be able to keep the peace you’ve been dreaming about.” He kissed the back of her hands. “Trust me.”

Jenna did not want to trust him. She didn’t want him to talk to Ixy over the loudspeaker and arrange for Brazel to meet him at the station in orbit. She didn’t want him to leave her and call for a pod. She didn’t want to admit to the throbbing headache she was experiencing or the way her tongue felt like cement.

Why couldn’t she scream at him to stop? Why couldn’t she order Vash to sit on him? Where was her spirit?

It had gone from her.

When she stood on the docks and Sardius kissed her out in the open, she could barely feel it, barely register what he was doing. He was kissing her forehead, then her cheek, then the palm of her hand, then the corner of her bare shoulder, then her mouth, his lips touching hers, and he promised that it wasn’t for the last time.

“This is my mess. It’s my job to clean it up,” he whispered. “I always had to do this. It might as well be now.”

Through a film of tears that covered her eyes, she saw him wave goodbye. His hand was like the hand of a god who had touched her and loved her. He smiled.

When the pod closed and shot away from the dock, Jenna fell to her knees. He had smiled at her. That was his final farewell. Then she fell on her face, dipping her arm in the water. Misha folded herself in half on the dock next to her pleading with Jenna to get up.

Jenna didn’t answer and didn’t move.

She thought about his farewell smile and wondered what it meant. There had been a light in his eyes and something about the way he smacked his tongue against his teeth suggested playfulness. He did not look like a martyr going to his death. What did he look like? What did the expression on his face remind her of?

She rolled onto her back and saw the stars overhead. She would have had a perfect view if Misha had not blocked the tiny lights with her head.

“Go away,” Jenna shrieked, the tears suddenly coming fast and hard.

In unspeakable torment, she screamed on the dock. She screamed and screamed.

Jenna didn’t see the approaching forms in the water because of her pain. She didn’t see the Octavian mantles rising out of the water. She didn’t know they were there so she didn’t bother to count them. With their weak hearing, they heard the only sound they were ever likely to hear, the cry of ultimate pain. The first time Jenna set foot on Octavia Prime, she was told to scream. That was the only way the hipposyphis would stop rampaging. That night, she screamed harder than she did on that first day, and the Octavians heard her.

Favel was on the dock first. “What has happened?” he asked Misha and Vash.

Vash explained though he didn’t exactly understand himself. His explanation went, “I guess Ryatt was actually Sardius and he had to trade himself for Iker. He just left.”

Favel used one of his suckers to pull a wet tendril of Jenna’s hair off her face. “I suppose when you only love one person, this is how it ends.”

Misha had begun crying too.

“Vash,” Favel commanded. “Get her off the dock. Take her to bed. I’ll call Excelyn and Philip over. Doubtless, they have a few human drugs in their horde and they can calm her down with a tranquilizer. She can’t stay like this.”

In her room, Misha and Vash pulled the sequined dress off her. They got her into bed and pulled the covers over her, just in time for Favel to be wheeled in.

He put out two tentacles and cupped her hand between the two of them. “We’ll pray for you,” he said soothingly.

“You believe in prayer?” she asked numbly.

“I believe in something greater than myself that I can call upon when a miracle is necessary. Ixy gave me a better grasp of the situation. There’s no point in worrying. I’ll stay here with you until we see the handoff. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

Excelyn came in. “Open your mouth,” she said, before dropping two drops of something that tasted like oranges on Jenna’s tongue. “You’re going to feel better in the morning,” the old doctor assured her.

But if Excelyn said anything else after that, Jenna didn’t hear it. She was already gone.