Page 32 of Defiance (The Intersolar Union #7)

Bjorek Dasin and four other agents joined them soon after Charlie showed Novak the freezer she’d been stashed in with two of her own bodies and one Imani with frost glittering around her nose and eyelashes. It was in power saving mode, flooding heat into its extremities to fight off frostbite with the end of its charge.

He studied the facsimile of his brother’s vira with calculating interest. Her scent was imprinted on his colear?, and like Charlie’s imposter, the scent was missing key environmental markers found in human silk and teeth and nails. He breathed in the drying aqueous humor around her eyeballs. Rather than a natural solvent, all he detected was a saline lubricant.

While seeing his brother’s vira was disturbing, Charlie’s dolls made his heart thump and his eyes wild. They were crumpled on the floor, huddled together back to chest. One had a stitch in her brow, her eyes open a sliver and staring at the darkness in resignation. These didn’t smell any more complete than the Imani doll, but their pose… These two dolls knew they were dying, not powering down for long term storage. They had living code.

Novak couldn’t look at them for long. He couldn’t turn away from Charlie either, afraid that if he didn’t keep her in his sights that she’d vanish. What if she was a ghost and her real body lay at his feet lifeless?

He pulled her from the freezer in front of the others with his colear? buried in her living scent and saturating the top of his muzzle with the oils of her silk. She murmured comfortingly, brushing down the plumage that had hardened again in the presence of others until the panic subsided and they wilted lovingly for her. Though he’d been able to feel the pressure and rasp of hands through his feathers’ quills before, her embrace now overwhelmed him, branded directly into the nerves beneath his flesh.

Novak had the deep, instinctive impression that no one else would be able to touch him like that.

“Clean-up is underway up top,”

Dasin said, clearing his throat to interrupt. The other agents focused on their jobs, sparing them only a glance now and then as they removed the dolls on hovering gurneys.

“Clean-up for what, exactly?”

Charlie asked.

Neither advenan answered, but Charlie knew. She had to. Novak had been transparent about his work from the beginning. She didn’t push, instead taking his hand and leading him into the lift.

When they exited the building amidst a buzz of activity, the courtyard was lined in white bodybags. Charlie looked on with a solemn stare, but her shoulders were straight and her chin was high. She gave Novak’s hand a squeeze.

“Thank you,”

she said quietly as another bag was laid out next in line.

A commotion at the front of the campus caught his ear, drawing their attention. Shouting and scuffling, a venandi growl that could rattle the bones from a distance.

“No, I have to tell them, let me in!”

Charlie’s eyes widened. She grabbed Novak by the feathers.

“That’s Sath.”

Without another word, she strode across the courtyard. Novak reached for her wrist and stopped her first.

“Are you sure you want to see him?”

he asked quietly. Charlie yanked her hand away with a crease in her brow.

“Of course, I do.”

Novak reached for her hand again, more gently this time. His tail wrapped around her elbow too. He wasn’t fond of letting her walk away just yet.

“He was with Caher and Guei in the palace. He was the one holding you when you were sedated at the ball.”

Charlie blew a curl out of her face and shook him off.

“Well now I definitely want to see him,”

she growled, turning on her heel. She walked like a warrior into battle, the sun glancing off her wild silk like newly minted copper.

Novak followed after, turning the entrance to the courtyard to find Sath’s fine tunic bunched up in the hands of a venandi agent. He was resisting, using his height and leg strength to gain leverage, but the man wasn’t trained for a scuffle. He bared his teeth, showing off his fangs in what the hjarna would consider extreme, inappropriate anger.

“Back off,”

Charlie demanded. The venandi snapped his mandibles with frustration, but let Sath go. The envoy stared at her in shock, then his eyes shuttered. He lifted his chin to Novak in a wretched, betrayed expression.

“I need to speak with you privately. It’s about Charlie.”

“Charlie who’s standing right here,”

she said, smacking her own chest with one hand.

“Not likely,”

Sath growled, shoulders hunched.

“Oh, get bloody tossed, you backstabbing sack of hrk!”

Novak swooped low and grabbed Charlie around the waist just as she was about to lunge. He chuckled, hauling her back.

“Woah there, sunset. I’m guessing he’s here to warn us about the doll.”

Novak raised his brow over Charlie’s head, prompting Sath. The hjarna brushed his crest, blinking out of sync in confusion.

“Charlie?”

he breathed, hardly able to believe it.

“What were you doing with Caher and Guei, you bloody traitor?”

Charlie wriggled in Novak’s grip.

“I—”

Sath’s shoulders deflated.

“I was trying to protect you, yes?”

Novak felt bitter reality seep back in at his words. He ran his tongue over his teeth, trying to rid himself of the flavor of judgment.

“I thought there was more to you, Sath,”

Charlie raged, accent so thick that Novak’s linguitor missed every other word.

“Novak is good. And he’s mine. So go fuck yourself, ya gobshite! I swear I’ll lose the plot if people keep making eyes—”

“From the mob!”

Sath yelled over her.

“Novak—hm?—was getting pulled, yes, pulled away. I-I didn’t want, nn, for you to get hurt. I told you, yes?”

he turned his pleading eyes on the advenan.

“I told you that I had her.”

The iron buckshot tearing his insides apart dissipated. Sath had been talking to him, not Guei? He turned his ears back and gave Charlie one human nod of confirmation, letting go of his hellion slowly until her feet touched the ground again.

“He did,” he said.

“Chairwoman Guei would not allow me to accompany you to the hospital,”

Sath sighed.

“I waited, yes? Until morning, out here in this courtyard.”

He nodded to the manicured stones behind them, his eyes sticking on the bodybags for a brief moment. His marigold cheeks paled slightly, then he blinking the sight away.

“I was told to remove myself. That I would be commed. So I paced outside, hm, and when you were discharged you… You were fine. You said Novak scared you, yes, and that you wanted to spawn with me after all.”

Sath swallowed hard. He looked Charlie full in the face, hands limp at his sides in defeat.

“I know my dear friend better than that.”

“Sath…”

When Charlie ran for him this time, Novak didn’t try to stop her. She wrapped her arms around Sath’s slim chest, cheek squished against his wrinkled tunic.

“I turned in my resignation last night, yes, and called the press about the fiasco. Your arrest was all over the news feeds,”

Sath said to Novak over her head.

“What they were saying was—”

“Doesn’t matter,”

Novak said, snapping his tail. Sath closed his mouth in understanding. Charlie had been through a lot. She didn’t need public opinion weighing on her shoulders too.

Sath shook his head in disagreement.

“It does matter. Or if it doesn’t, I will make it so.”

They grinned at each other, and a little of the hjarna’s cool confidence returned.

“I like a challenge, yes? Maybe negotiating colony toilets isn’t the best use of my skills.”

The three of them spent the next two sols in the guest riad. Sath was serious about advocating for advenan rights. He dove into the role with relish, booking so many feeds that the Citadel took note. Baella Atarian commed him personally and asked him to provide the council with a proposal.

“Strike while the iron is hot,” she said.

No one questioned Novak when he dumped his bag in Charlie’s room or took her out to eat. The hjarna doctor trembled during her exam, but not because he was holding her hand. He took her vitals and examined the bruises on her arms that looked like long fingerprints. He was one of Ferulis’s people, but grief pulled at his features. Grief and shame.

The Huajile Institute for Xenobiological Studies was one of the oldest institutions in the Union. A crowning jewel for the hjarna, now tarnished beyond repair. The repercussions were staggering. It would take decades to rebuild.

By the next day, all non-essential HIXBS services were frozen. Their hospitals, clinics, and pharmaceutical branches remained intact, but research labs and administrative offices were seized. The leisure cruiser that had been stashed in the Med-Go freighter had been transporting the Imani doll, their first production model. It was an empty shell, ready to download living code. That had been the plan until Guei learned that Charlie was attending instead, forcing her to pick up her last remaining dolls from Huajile on the way to the event.

It was a messy affair. There were four Charlie dolls, but they were in various states of repair. Two failed to upload Charlie’s living code to Guei’s satisfaction. Those were the ones found dead—as opposed to decommissioned—on sub-64. The others were still in their charging docks aboard the cruiser.

Director Caher and Chairwoman Guei were detained, their faces plastered all over the media feeds. Baella Atarian called an immediate motion to remove the chairwoman from her seat on the council and open an investigation. In the weeks after, they learned that Guei had held HIXBS ransom, using her leverage as chairwoman of medical innovation and health access to withhold funding and push for trade contracts with Med-Go, a subsidiary of Rakta Corps. The move would export all care doll fabrication to their facilities in the Outer Rim, creating a legal loophole for the problematic company to exploit in its efforts to return to business in the Union.

Guei claimed, however, to not know anything about the media leak involving Thel and Liv Atarian. Nor the strange signals in and around the colony.

Of all the disturbing things they learned over the next several weeks—the dolls Ferulis and Baellanus Atarian found in the abandoned Med-Go freighter, the mass grave of human tissues and organs from early failed attempts in a cistern behind a Szumarian HIXBS research facility, the doll houses that had popped up on Dharatee and, to everyone’s shock, Samridve—Novak found the lack of insight into the hackings to be the most unsettling.

Maybe they would never know. As their return to Yaspur loomed closer, he felt the unease drift away. Maybe it was alright not to know.

Because maybe it was finally over.