Which means they were in La Raja, Neeis. We made it.
She tilted her head up toward the night sky and inhaled the warm air, detecting the fruit trees and flowers within the miasma of city smells. For the first time in a long time, she smiled.
“Blast radius’ll take care of it,” Remy finally acknowledged.
“Mmm. So, what’s your deal? Ex-marine gone tech rogue?”
He shrugged. “You?”
She shrugged back. “Just another girl trying to find a way to get by.”
“Not just another girl…” he said coolly.
Her shoulders knotted, and she moved her right foot back, into fighting position. “You gotta problem with that?”
The soldier’s face went stone-cold, his blues eyes locked on hers. “No.”
The kitcoon crawled out of her pocket, up the front of her jacket, and perched on her shoulder before giving a loud meow in her ear.
“I know you’re hungry,” she said, pulling him off and scratching behind his ears. “I’ll get you something soon.”
“What?” she said, reading Remy’s disapproving expression. “At least he volunteers what he’s thinking.”
“What’d the Dominion want with that thing?”
“His name is Kio.”
“Looks like a street ’coon.”
“He’s more than that,” she said, brushing back Kio’s raggedy fur. Her heart softened. Much more.
Worth saving.
(Like me…?)
A part of her, buried deep down inside long ago, eased.
Remy pulled out his multitool and clicked on a blue light. With her holding the kitcoon still, he scanned over the fresh scar and showed her the readings projected in holographics out of the side of the gray handle. “That’s sim/stim gear jacked with high-caliber reverse coms.”
“Meaning?”
Remy cocked his head to the side, analyzing. “It’s a sophisticated neural input/output device. If I had to guess, they were trying to replicate…”
He went silent.
“Telepathy,” she whispered. “An old woman gave him to me. She said that she and many others risked rescuing him from Dominion labs. I think she meant the tech, not specifically Kio. With all the military’s obsession with telepaths, all the imprisonments—in the end, they just want our talent. But why? What’s the endgame?”
Remy shook his head. “I’ll get it out, but it’ll break the tech… Unless that’d make him undesirable to you.”
His inference made her wonder: How much could she get for him from the USC or black-market buyers?
Probably enough for seven lifetimes.
The kitcoon meowed loudly, reminding them of his hunger, arcing his head back and adding to the dramatic effect.
Rex’s heart melted, her emotions softening. Wait…is the effect magnified by the tech?
All this time, was the kitcoon, as sweet and endearing as he was, projecting—and influencing—thoughts?
He saved our lives. But her stomach knotted. What kind of weapon could the Dominion make with that?
“Get it out. Make sure it’s destroyed,” she whispered, stroking the kitcoon’s back. “I think he’s ready to move on.”
Remy cleared his throat. “Yeah. I get that.”
The kitcoon made a chortling sound and sniffed the air, excited. Rex delighted in the spark in his eyes, and how furiously he wagged his tail.
“It’s just a parking lot, silly boy,” she whispered to the kitcoon. But to him it was a place with familiar smells, sights—
Home.
“I can’t believe he still trusts after all he’s been through,” she said as Kio crawled up onto her shoulder again.
Remy checked the batteries on his hovercycle and then angled his gaze toward the curved skyscrapers and twisting rail systems to the south, at the heart of La Raja. His voice wavered, speaking each word carefully. “Not just anyone.”
Kio licked Rex’s cheek, then whapped his paw into her temple with another insistent meow.
“Ouch, okay,” she said, prying him off her shoulder and putting him back in her pocket. “I’m starving, too. Let’s find something to eat.” As Remy kicked on the hovercycle, she slid in behind him.
When she wrapped her arms around Remy, he relaxed. He tilted his head back, pressing against hers.
“You meant what you said back there?” he asked, barely audible above the rumbling hovercycle.
“What?”
He didn’t move or offer an explanation. But she felt the ache radiating from his heart, and the quickening of his pulse as he awaited her response.
Listening with her deepest senses, she recalled what she said to him in telepathic limbo: “You’re not alone in this. You never have to be alone again.”
A telepath, tech rogue, and a kitcoon. I wonder what kind of trouble we’ll get into? The kitcoon wiggled in her pocket, protesting his entrapment. She reached inside and let him nibble on her fingernails. Thanks to you.
“Yeah,” she whispered back. She pinched him on the stomach through his tank top. “Just get me something to eat before I change my mind.”
Remy grunted, his equivalent of a laugh, and sped them toward the city.
To read more about Rex’s adventures, check out: Laws of Attraction.
Amazon bestselling author L.J Hachmeister writes and fights—although she tries to avoid doing them at the same time. The world champion stick-fighter is best known in the literary world for her epic science fiction series, Triorion, her LGBTQ+ sci-fi romance, Laws of Attraction, her bestselling anthology, Parallel Worlds: The Heroes Within, and her equally epic love of sweets.
If you would like to learn more about L.J’s work as an LGBTQ+ and science fiction/fantasy author, please visit www.triorion.com. All book sale profits are donated to Lifeline Puppy Rescue. Read books and save lives!
A Cry in the Night
by Lucienne Diver
I LET MYSELF INTO SPIRIT’S ENCLOSURE, as I did at the end of every day, needing to soak up the love after a shift spent with people and paperwork, only he didn’t come running.
“Spirit, it’s me,” I called, as though he didn’t know. As though the big, gray wolf-dog couldn’t smell me coming from a mile away and hear me from, literally, ten times that distance.
But Spirit, and his skittish mate Frost, had been acting strangely, which was why Thompson, our biologist, was with me. When I did our tours, I always said Spirit was over eighty percent wolf and one hundred percent love, which was a miracle after the way he’d been treated.
One of my neighbors, in the wilds of Colorado, had decided it would be amazing to have a wolf-dog to impress his friends, but he hadn’t done his research, and took all his own failings out on Spirit. A mix of more than fifty percent wolf was unlikely to ever be domesticated. They wouldn’t learn to wait for walkies. They would never be comfortable living within walls without clear sightlines of anything coming at them. The poor animal would stress and act out because of it. Gavin reacted by beating and starving Spirit, taking it like a challenge to his manhood and trying to “break” the animal, leaving Spirit chained out in the yard in all kinds of weather.
Which was where I came in. Gavin took off on one of his long hauls, leaving Spirit bolted down with a single bowl of food and water and a major storm threatening. Well, wolves were outdoor creatures; they could survive in the wild, but there they had the freedom to seek food and shelter. Spirit had no freedom at all. Until I arrived with my trusty bolt-cutters after listening to him howl for too long and deciding to do something about it.