Chapter 54: Regrets

It was a tiny wet sound, bubbling up from somewhere deep in her chest.

"Hehe... hehehe..."

Camila’s fingertips froze on her shoulder.

"Chloe...?"

The laughing stopped as suddenly as it had started as Chloe’s head stayed down.

Her breath kept rattling in and out and a drop of blood fell off the tip of her nose and landed in the puddle under her chin.

Plip!

Nobody else had noticed since Ren was still talking.

"The chip..." Jin-Ah rasped from the floor.

Her voice was shaking so hard it barely came out, but she forced it anyway, dragging her mind toward the only anchor she had left.

"The chip you put in the life support bus... What did it do?"

Ren looked over at her with his eyebrows raised in mild patronizing amusement.

"Ah. The computer girl wants the technical specs." He crossed his arms and grinned. "Sure, why not? It’s a standard mercenary override. See, the system has a rule... Axiom Four... If a Master Captain dies, his seeded vessel triggers a catastrophic self-destruct within sixty minutes. It’s an anti-piracy protocol... A dead captain’s ship turns into a miniature supernova so the tech can’t fall into scavenger hands."

He tapped two fingers against the side of his own neck, right where a pulse would be.

"The chip freezes that timer... The virus locks the ship’s logic bus in a permanent bio-telemetry loop, It tells the ship’s brain the Captain’s still alive, just lying there in a comatose flatline."

He snapped his fingers. "And the hour-long explosion stops dead in its tracks..."

"And the ship...?" Elena whispered through her tears.

"With nobody aboard to pull the chip, the scrubbers and the air pumps slowly cannibalize themselves over twenty-four to forty-eight hours."

He chuckled softly.

"The core runs cold and the air freezes... That’s plenty of time for me to drop you girls off at the jump gate, come back with a recovery crew, strip the Graventhal plating and pull that fancy S-Rank railgun off the spine... a Tier-1 corvette’s small, but that turret alone buys me years worth of luxury rations."

On the aft screen, the dark little shape of the Wanderer-7 hung frozen in the void.

Somewhere inside it, the air was already getting cold.

"Where..." Jin-Ah swallowed with her throat clicking and her eyes jumping up to his face. "Where are you taking us...?"

His smile stretched until his back teeth showed.

"I told you... The Federation. There’s a major transport hub eight light-hours past the rim... Earth might be gone, but the galaxy’s full of buyers who pay top dollar for fresh unbranded stock."

He took a slow step toward the line of them, his eyes crawling over Elena’s torn uniform, Camila’s trembling body, Harper’s bowed head.

"Six young healthy educated Earth women... The Federation buyers love that. You’ll go to orbital estates, luxury pleasure cruisers, labor colonies... With what I get for the six of you, I’ll buy myself a retirement sector in the inner systems and never smell burnt propellant again."

His eyes stopped on Chloe.

She was still breathing in short ragged gasps with her bloody hands tied behind the bar and her lips peeled back off her teeth in a snarl she didn’t even seem to know she was making.

Behind her bangs, the red in her eyes flickered on and off like a dying bulb.

Ren crouched down until his face was half a meter from hers.

"And you," he whispered, his voice dripping with ravenous greed. "An S-Rank Supernatural... A living weapon, The research syndicates are going to pay ten times market rate to strap you to a table and peel those regeneration glands right out of your throat."

Chloe’s head came up slowly like a doll being lifted on a string.

Her face was a mask of dried blood, the bullet scar a puckered pink star in the middle of her forehead, and her eyes were glowing a sick dim red through the matted hair.

She looked at him and she smiled.

Her red-stained teeth showing all the way back to the gums.

"You smell scared," she whispered.

Ren’s eyebrow twitched.

"Under the soap," Chloe breathed, her head tilting slowly to the side, further past where a neck should comfortably go. "Under the sandalwood... You smell like a little boy who wet the bed."

She giggled, feeling high and breathless. "I can hear your heart, Ren. It’s fast... It’s so fast... Is it for me?"

She lunged.

Her whole body snapped forward against the ropes with a force that made the iron bar groan in its brackets...

CREEEAK!

...and her teeth snapped shut one centimeter from the tip of his nose.

CLACK!

However Ren didn’t blink.

He just laughed and stood up before dusting his knees.

"Ten times market rate," he said to Voss, still grinning. "I told you... Look at that, Feisty."

Chloe sagged back against the bar, panting and then, softly, staring at his boots with her head still tilted wrong, she started to hum.

It was a lullaby and it went on and on under her breath while the blood dripped off her chin.

Camila stared at her with wide wet eyes and didn’t say a word while Ren turned to Aoi, and his smile went sickeningly bright.

"And of course... my dear older sister. The brilliant accomplished academy instructor. I’m sure some high-ranking Federation bureaucrat will find a thirty-year-old Kyoto scholar very charming indeed."

"Ren... please..."

Aoi threw her whole upper body forward against the ropes until the polymer burned straight through her sleeves and tore the skin off her wrists.

Her glasses slid off her face and hit the steel deck, and one of the lenses cracked.

CRACK!

She didn’t care about the glasses or her dignity or anything else left in the universe.

She fell forward onto her knees as far as the rope would let her and pressed her forehead against his dirty combat boots.

"Ren, look at me!" she screamed through her tears, choking on her own breath, her voice ripping her throat to pieces. "I’m your sister! I raised you! I washed your clothes! I stayed awake all night when you had pneumonia in that freezing apartment! I know I left! I know I went to the university and left you alone with Mother! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Ren! Do whatever you want to me! Sell me! Kill me! But let them go! Let the girls go! They’re just kids! Leo was just a boy!"

Her shoulders heaved.

"Please, Ren... by our mother’s memory... have mercy!"

Ren stood motionless, looking down at the woman kneeling at his feet.

The silence stretched for five agonizing seconds, broken only by ragged sobbing and Chloe’s soft out-of-tune humming then his right leg moved.

WHAM!

His steel-toed boot came up in a vicious arc and caught her dead across the left cheekbone.

CRACK!

Her head snapped sideways and her whole upper body slammed into the iron bulkhead.

Her lips split and sprayed dark blood across the grey paint, and she crashed down onto the deck with her ears roaring white noise and her vision swimming in red and shadow, gasping for air through a jaw that felt like it had broken in half.

"SENSEI!" Elena screamed.

Harper jerked against her ropes so hard the bar rang and roared something with no words in it at all through her bloody lips.

The humming stopped.

Chloe’s head turned, slowly, toward Aoi lying on the floor then back up toward Ren and the red in her eyes, for one second, burned bright and steady instead of flickering.

Ren adjusted the cuff of his tunic and wiped a tiny speck of his sister’s blood off the toe of his boot with the hem of his trousers then he stepped over and planted his boots fifteen centimeters from her bleeding face, bent at the waist and rested his forearms on his knees, looking down into her swollen shattered eyes with nothing in his own but pure frozen venom.

"Don’t you ever speak Mother’s name to me again," he whispered.

His eyes locked onto hers.

"...I always hated you, Nee-san."

The taste of iron filled her mouth feeling hot and sickening.

Her cheek was pressed against the freezing deck.

The boot had split the skin over her cheekbone and swollen her left eye completely shut until that whole side was nothing but a red pulsing haze, and her hair lay tangled across her face, soaking in the puddle spreading from her mouth, while the raider’s engines drilled up through her jawbone.

Ren didn’t step back.

He stayed crouched on the balls of his feet with his forearms across his knees, looking at her bleeding face with the same mild calm he’d used asking Camila about tomato cuttings a day ago.

"You always had that look, Nee-san," he said softly.

The slate-iron walls swallowed every syllable and left his words dry and dead in the cold air.

"That quiet sorrowful face you made whenever you looked down at me from the top of the stairs... Like my very existence was a tragedy you had to endure for the family’s honor."

She tried to part her cracked lips as a spasm of pain shot through her jaw and locked the words behind her teeth.

He reached out with two fingers and caught her chin, tilting her face up so her one good eye had to meet his.

His hand was warm and his skin was clean.

"When Mother collapsed in the kitchen in Kyoto," he went on, his Kansai lilt flat and level and empty of feeling, "you were in Tokyo. Twenty-four years old... You’d just gotten your junior fellowship... Do you remember what you told me over the video call?"

Her breath hitched in her chest.

"You told me it was your breakthrough year," he whispered. "You said you couldn’t leave the institute because the department chair was reviewing your tenure track... You told a twenty-one-year-old boy to take a few days off his vocational training and handle the intake paperwork at the clinic."

He tilted her chin a little higher.

"’Just three days, Ren... I’ll be on the bullet train Friday night.’"

He let out a short quiet chuckle that felt like ice water poured down her spine.

"Friday night never came, did it? Friday turned into Monday... Monday turned into three months... Then Mother’s diagnosis came back... Degenerative pulmonary fibrosis which is a three-year death sentence."

His head tilted. "And what did the brilliant dutiful daughter do?"

He let go of her chin, and her face dropped a couple of centimeters back toward the deck.

His eyes never left hers.

"You stayed in Tokyo." Every word came down with the dull crushing weight of an iron hammer. "You kept your little apartment, took your shiny post-doctoral stipend and published papers on gravitational anomalies and for three years... three whole years, Aoi... I changed her bedpans... I bought her oxygen bottles from black-market dealers in Osaka because the insurance wouldn’t cover the high-pressure cylinders... I washed the vomit out of her nightgowns in cold water because the gas company shut off our hot water, twice."

Down the line of bound women, the silence was suffocating.

Elena had stopped crying.

She was staring at the floor with her fingers clawing at the rope behind her back, breathing in shallow horrified little gasps.

Camila’s sobs had choked off into a strangled wheeze, her eyes wide and glassy, staring at the brother and sister like she couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

Harper had stopped yelling, her head was down and her face was hidden behind her singed bangs.

Behind her back, her fingers were moving.

She was feeling along the cord and finding the knot... She’d tuned several weapons in her life so she knew exactly what vibration did to things.

She just needed a few seconds where nobody was looking at her.

"Every two weeks," Ren said, "you sent a money transfer... Fifty thousand yen. Always with a typed memo that was the same. ’Focus on your studies, Ren... I’m working hard for our future.’"

His lip curled.

"You sent money because you were too much of a coward to smell her lungs rotting... You bought your own peace of mind one bank transfer at a time, so you’d never have to sit in that room and watch our mother choke on her own foam."

A single tear slipped out of Aoi’s good eye and burned a line through the salt and blood on her cheek.

She wanted to scream that she’d worked sixteen-hour shifts for that money.

That she’d skipped meals and lived on instant noodles in a freezing four-tatami room to wire every single yen home to Kyoto... That she’d cried every night in the dark of the university lab, terrified of the day the call would come.

She opened her mouth however nothing came out because every single word he’d said was true.