Author: Rachel Bach

I stared at him, dumbfounded, and then tightened my fingers around the gun he’d placed in my hand. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’ve lied to you since the day we met,” Rupert said. “I do not deserve your trust or respect, but I need you to believe me now, and this seemed like the only way.” He nodded up at the cockpit. “This ship is stocked with enough supplies to last two weeks. There are emergency clearances for all gates in known space in the navigational computer, and I’ve loaded the ship’s petty cash account with a little over a million in Republic Scrip. You can access the money through the central control panel. The pass code is your birthday.”

“How do you know my birthday?”

Rupert’s lips curved in the ghost of a smile. “I looked it up.”

My arm shot up, pointing the disrupter at his head. “What kind of game are you playing? You sound like you want me to shoot you and take your ship.”

“You can if you choose,” Rupert said, leaning back. “I’ve given you all the power, Devi. If you want, you can shoot my head off right now. This ship is fast and stealthy, and I’ve removed all the tracers from the security panel. Without those, even the Eyes will have trouble finding you.”

I held the gun steady, keeping it trained on the spot between his eyes. “Hell of a gamble you’re making, Charkov. I’ve shot you before.”

“You have,” he agreed, his voice calm and clear, like we were discussing dinner plans and not his possible demise. “But I deserved it. And I couldn’t think of any other way to convince you.”

“Convince me of what?”

He looked straight at me, heart in his eyes. “That I am not your enemy.”

My jaw fell slack. For a moment, I could only sit there staring like an idiot. And then I started to laugh.

CHAPTER 12

I laughed so hard I almost felt sick. I couldn’t help it. After all the tension and fear and heartbreak, the idea that he could look at me and say that with a straight face was too much. Rupert watched me crack up with his usual blank hide-everything expression, but I could tell it was getting to him because his jaw was doing that tightening thing it did when he was upset. And that was what stopped my laughter. Not because I cared that he was upset, but because I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to try playing this card now.

“You’re not my enemy, eh?” I said, my lips peeling back in a snarl as I leveled the gun at his head again. “Well, you sure have a screwed-up way of showing it. If you didn’t want me to think of you as an enemy, maybe you shouldn’t have tried to capture me back in the woods. Or handed me to Caldswell after the phantom. Or forced me off a cliff.”

“I have done you very wrong,” Rupert agreed, raising his hands in surrender. “But you have to understand. At the time, I felt I had no choice. I’m an Eye. Everything I do is in the service of fighting the phantoms. If there was a chance you could be a breakthrough, even a small one, I could not let you go.”

“But now you’ve changed your mind?” I snapped.

Rupert nodded. “Yes.”

I stared at him a second longer, and then lowered the gun with a curse. “What the hell, Rupert?” I shouted. “I don’t get you at all. You can’t really think all this posturing is going to make me forget what you are, what you did. Am I just supposed to buy that you had a change of heart? Especially now, when you just read the report about how I’m the phantom killer?”

“The report has nothing to do with it,” Rupert said, his voice heating. “And I’m not posturing. I gave you that gun precisely because I knew you wouldn’t believe me, but I prepared this ship because I wanted to give you a choice.”

“Choice?” I roared. “Choice between what? Running like a coward until the Eyes hunt me down or giving up early and trotting off to the lab like a good little girl?”

For the first time since I’d seen him talking to the baron, Rupert’s mask slipped. He lurched forward, eyes flashing with anger. “I’m trying to give you a chance to make your own decisions about your future,” he said. “You think I’m not aware of what’s at stake? That virus could be the end of the war I’ve fought my entire life. I should be dragging you back to Caldswell by your hair, but I won’t. I can’t. Because I love you, and I refuse to fight you anymore.”

“You love me?” I shrieked. “You loved me when you shot me in the head! You loved me when you drove me off a cliff! If there’s anything I’ve learned about your love, Charkov, it’s that it only matters when it’s convenient for you.”

“And that’s why I’m trying to make it right!” Rupert shouted, slamming his hands down on the bench so hard the steel frame bent.

The sound made us both jump. Rupert snatched his hands back at once, then rubbed them over his face. “I’m not lying to you, Devi,” he said, his voice softer but not yet calm. “I know I’ve hurt you too much to ever make you believe that, but it’s the truth.” He blew out a long breath. “Can I tell you a story?”

I almost told him no, but that was just my anger talking. I was actually curious to hear what kind of story Rupert thought could make me trust him ever again. I rested the heavy gun on my lap and motioned for him to go ahead, but Rupert didn’t start at once.

He’d been the one offering to talk, but now that he was on the spot, Rupert seemed hesitant. That was unusual. He was usually the decisive one, the man with the plan. Now, though, Rupert looked almost afraid, and I slowly realized that whatever story he was trying to tell me wasn’t one he told often, or liked to tell at all.

“I’ve been an Eye for a long time,” he said at last. “It was the only thing I ever wanted to be.”

His words fell off again after that, so I prompted him. “How do you grow up wanting to be part of a secret organization?”

“I didn’t grow up wanting it,” he said quickly, squeezing his hands on his knees. “You’ve heard of what happened to Svenya?”

I nodded. Svenya was the Terran core world whose sudden destruction had alerted the universe to the real danger of phantoms, though the Eyes had covered up the true cause of its disappearance.

“Svenya was my home,” Rupert went on. “I grew up there with my parents, my grandmother, and my sister.”

“Tanya,” I said.

Rupert flinched like her name hurt him. He was staring at the floor now, and with every word he spoke, his voice got tighter. “They came without warning,” he said. “Tanya and I were on our way to school when the sirens went off. We thought it was an earthquake, but it went on and on. We tried to go home, but the soldiers stopped us. They said we had to evacuate.”

I knew where this was going. I’d seen his memory, the soldiers tearing him away, Tanya screaming at him to go, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt. Even though there were less than three feet between us, Rupert felt miles away. All I could do was sit and listen.

“There weren’t enough ships for everyone,” he went on. “The soldiers were keeping people back, trying to get the children out first. There was one spot left. Tanya made them give it to me. She said she was going to get our parents and they’d be on the next ship. She said she’d be right behind me.”

“But there was no next ship,” I said.

Rupert shook his head. “Five minutes after I got out, the whole planet started to crumble. No one else escaped.”

He looked at me then, and I couldn’t help flinching. There was no calm in his expression now, just a pain so old and deep it hurt to look at. “Everything I knew died that day,” he said. “My family, my friends, my home, even my language, they were all gone. Svenya was a planet of billions. Only ten thousand of us survived.”

As he spoke, I could see his memory clearly: young Rupert, standing by the window, looking out at the floating rocks that were all that was left of his home, his family. I could feel it, too, the incomprehension, the anger, the crushing feeling of being utterly alone. “How old were you?”

Rupert dropped his eyes. “Nine,” he whispered. “I was nine.”

I dropped my eyes as well, because what do you say to that? But as the silence stretched, I realized something was off. “Wait a second,” I said. “Wasn’t Svenya destroyed seventy years ago?”

Rupert didn’t actually move, not that I could see, but I would have sworn his whole body tightened. “Sixty-three.”

“So if you were nine…” I paused, doing the math in my head. “That would make you seventy-two.”

“Seventy-one,” he said, his voice suspiciously sharp. “My birthday isn’t until next month.”

I gaped at him. Rupert didn’t look a day over thirty. “How the hell are you seventy-one years old?”

Rupert shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s the symbiont,” he explained, running a nervous hand through his hair. “If you survive the implantation, it can extend your life.”

The age thing must really bother him, I realized. This was the most flustered I’d ever seen Rupert. If I hadn’t been so angry at him, it would have been adorable. “How extended are we talking here?”

“No one knows for certain since we’ve never had a symbiont die of old age,” Rupert said. “But there are some who are well over a hundred.”

“So do you age at all?” I asked. “Like Caldswell. Did he get his symbiont late, or is he just really old?”

“Both,” Rupert said. “Commander Caldswell had a decorated career before he became an Eye, but he looks exactly the same now as he did when he recruited me.”

“So how did he find you?” I said. “Did they comb the survivors looking for likely recruits?” Considering how the Eyes treated the daughters, I wouldn’t put it past them to recruit new soldiers from orphaned children with no one else to turn to. It would certainly explain why Rupert was so damn loyal.

Rupert must have suspected what I was getting at, because he glared at me. “Of course not,” he said. “I couldn’t even apply to the Eyes until I’d served a decade in the army. I knew about them because of the camp.”

I frowned. “Camp?”

“After Svenya, they couldn’t let us rejoin the Republic,” he explained. “The emperor phantom was the one who actually destroyed the planet, but smaller phantoms always follow the larger. Svenya was crawling with the things at the end, and among those who escaped, nearly all of us had run into the invisible monsters at some point during the evacuation. The Eyes couldn’t let those stories become public, so they took us to an uninhabited colony world at the very edge of the Republic and ordered us to stay there.”

“I’m surprised they let you live,” I said bitterly.

“There are those who think they shouldn’t have,” he admitted. “But even the Eyes didn’t have the stomach to kill ten thousand terrified refugees, most of whom were children.” He paused. “I guess it wasn’t such a bad place, but honestly, I don’t remember much from that time. I’d seen enough of the Eyes by then to know what they did, and I’d already decided I’d do whatever it took to become one. Caldswell himself signed the papers to get me out of the camp so I could join the army when I was seventeen. The Eyes didn’t contact me again until ten years later, but when they did, I signed on at once. I’ve worked for them ever since.”

I sighed. At least my early suspicions that Rupert had an army background had been on the mark. “So why the rush to be an Eye?” I asked. “Was it revenge?”

Rupert shook his head. “Tanya would hate me if I did what Eyes must do to avenge her death. She never held a grudge, ever. No, I became an Eye to make sure what happened to Tanya, what happened to me, never happened to anyone else ever again.”