Blood Ties Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author's Note

  To my editor, Zee Monodee, who is pretty kick-ass and speaks a million languages.

  Prologue

  The ruins sat up the hill, stark, weathered, rough sides tinted a dusty gray against the midday sun. Yellow grass flowered in the fields around them, waist-high and dry as a bone, bending in ripples from the soft wind. The air smelled hot to her. Scorched. Already, the skin on her forearms was burning under the sun.

  All her dreams were taking place in summer, lately. And they were getting more and more lucid.

  A good sign, perhaps, if Nomiki was right and Seirlin had been taking their memories.

  Karin looked down at herself, lifting her hands. Twelve years old, she’d guess. Skinny. Stick-thin, really—she and Nomiki had both been that way. Still were, in some ways, but she suspected the constant treatments had done a number on them growing up. Hard to put on weight when one was sick every other week.

  Jeans covered her legs all the way down to her ankles, worn and faded from use. The T-shirt had a bright orange base, a navy blue trim, and fit her a bit like a parachute. The compound had bought them in bulk, single-sizes shared between all the kids to save money. She and Nomiki fit the smaller scale of the twelve-eighteen-year-old lots, but it felt like her sister wore hers better. As if it, in its bagginess, fit her style.

  On Karin, it just looked large and cheap.

  The wind rippled the grass again, this time pulling a chunk of her hair to plaster it against the front of her face. She raised her hand to move it back behind her ear, then froze.

  Her tattoo stared back at her, ugly and incongruent on her pale skin.

  The compound had joined a short-but-proud line of organizations that had tattooed its victims. Later, when she’d had the wherewithal to research it, she would find out just how awful and off-base it had been against the other historical contexts. Hers, a play on both the Ourobouros and Eurynome myths, featured an upside-down egg encircled by a snake that ate its own tail.

  A shadow passed overhead, distracting her. She squinted, looking up.

  Then, in the corner of her eye—she was being watched.

  Nomiki, thirteen, stood in the shadows of the nearest copse of trees, staring. With the harsh light of the sun reflected in the yellow grasses only feet from her, the underlighting caught her stiff, half-hostile expression in perfect detail. The orange shirt tilted on her neck, falling halfway down her thigh in its shapelessness. With the jeans underneath, the passiveness of her face, and the way her hair parted evenly on either side of her face, she looked almost like a boy.

  A van door slammed shut, the noise carrying up the hill. They both turned to look. Beyond the white-washed brick wall of the compound, the dusty, navy blue roof of a delivery van could be seen. A man walked across the lot, a tablet in his hand. As she watched, Dr. Sasha came out to meet him, her lab coat shining in the sun.

  The shadow passed again, this time over the parking lot. Neither the delivery man nor the doctor looked up at it, but Karin did. A hawk, larger than normal for this area, wheeled overhead, riding the currents. A dusty tan color, its feathers flecked with slivers and darts of darker hues, it moved in a lazy pattern. As it passed back over the tree growth beyond the compound’s gate, its wings flapped and its head turned back before it vanished past the branches. A few seconds later, it reappeared, soaring back across the compound.

  Nomiki watched it, too, and a frown drew down her eyebrows. She’d shifted, angling her body like some of the deer Karin had seen around the area, as if she were ready to run. Her eyes dropped and met Karin’s stare, holding it.

  Then, in a flash of movement, she was gone.

  Chapter 1

  The ship hung in space, a small speck on the horizon magnified into a visible, examinable shape on the bridge's main holoscreen. A cousin to the Nemina, the approaching Fallon scout shared many of her features—a pointed, angular nose with splayed front windows, a chunky, practical body, flared wings for atmo cruising. Even the propulsion gave off similar readings. In the past half hour of watching it approach, they'd busied themselves with analyzing it.

  Its arrival hadn't been a secret. Their outboard sensors had spotted it more than three thousand kilometers away. In space, with the enormous open distances and current scanning technologies, few things could take them by surprise.

  Except, just recently, Fallon had taken them by surprise.

  As the system's older stepchild, and the Alliance's foil after it had pulled out of its folds some twenty years earlier, the Fallon empire held the best military in both manpower and technology proportional to its population—tech which Karin Makos had been enjoying for the past month and a half. Her current ship, the Nemina, had come out of the empire's large fleet decommissioning two years ago, and although it had been stripped of its weapons and imperial comms, it still carried an above-average kick in its engine.

  Enough to out-accelerate an Alliance cruiser, as they'd recently discovered.

  Of course, that in itself wasn't strange. Cruisers were enormous, and the Nemina…

  Well, she was a scout. Fast and light, devoid of major armaments. Just like the approaching Fallon ship.

  Her sister was on it. Nomiki, whom she had spent the better part of the last two months searching for. After all this time, and all the struggles she’d gone through since the first Shadow attack, she was going to see her again. It felt too optimistic to be true, as if she were still in one of her dreams.

  But then, she wasn’t exactly in top form. Everything felt like a dream right now, from the haloed glare of the monitors to the tingling sensation that kept pricking the underside of her skin. She must have dozed off since the call. The ship was closer on the screen than she remembered from a few minutes ago—but not so close for the difference to be obvious.

  “So,” Soo-jin said from across the room, breaking the silence. “Your sister. Is she always homicidal, or is that a part-time gig?”

  Karin winced. Though both she and her sister had been birthed as products of a genetic and psychological experimentation program, the design of Nomiki's program had run a lot deadlier than her own magical light-producing capabilities, and some of the memories they shared had a lot more blood and death in them than she preferred.

  The immediate emotions associated with those images had diminished over time, but that didn't stop the flashes that ran across her mind whenever the topic came up. Oddly, they didn't portray the first time she'd seen Nomiki kill someone, but the third or fourth time, after they’d been well into their escape. The picture of her sister ahead of her in a darkened hallway—the pale white of her nightgown pulling at her senses like a ghost in the dim, green-tinged shine of an emergency exit sign, one half of a modified and sharpened set of scissors clutched hard in her bloodied grip—seemed to meld and shift together with another time when they'd killed a man by the side of the highway. Different place, different clothes, same tool.

  “Don't worry,” she said. “I'll vouch for you.”

  “Thanks.
I'd appreciate not dying.”

  Marc wandered into the room on the tail end of the sentence, a mug in his right hand and an eyebrow lifting. Streaks of dust crossed the front of his loose T-shirt at odd angles, a result of him moving cargo around the ship. Due to the similarities in ship design, they would need to alternate airlocks to avoid touching the wings together—which meant the Nemina's little-used aft airlock would see some action. As a scrounger, she really only needed one airlock to dock with space stations and other travel hubs. Last Karin had looked, they'd piled the stores from their second-last visit to Caishen in its hallway nook, complete with cargo netting to keep it in place.

  Not so great for welcoming guests aboard.

  Cookie, Marc's cousin and resident tech head, walked in behind him. The screens reflected in his eyes as he scanned them, his usual grinning, casual expression tightened by the frown on his brow. The engine analysis still took up the corner of the screen, and his eyes narrowed on it for a few seconds. “So, how deadly is she?”

  “Extremely,” she said.

  “Could she take out Marc?”

  “With her pinky. Sorry, Marc.” She tipped her head back to glance up at his face.

  He hovered at the flank of her chair, keeping a hand's breadth of distance between them. “None taken. I'm hardly a badass.”

  “You're a veteran. Don't sell yourself short. I've seen you fight.”

  He blew out a huff of air. “As I recall, you took out the last Shadow we faced together.”

  “Yeah, well, I'm magic.”

  “I was referring to the one you bludgeoned with a flashlight.” He leaned forward, brows knitting together at the ship on the screen. “That could hold over twenty people, you know.”

  “It could,” Soo-jin said. “But it doesn't. We've scanned.”

  His jaw moved again, the muscles going rigid in his cheek. The tendons in his neck tightened, more prominent in her angle of view. Karin lifted a hand to her dashboard and reopened a window on the screen with her finger. “The Nemina's given it a name.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The other scout. System recognizes it. FL-SC-254-S04.”

  “Creative.” He transferred his mug to his left hand and pointed to the screen. “First number indicates the home ship, second the individual ship number. She's the fourth scout of Fallon's 254th ship.”

  “Huh. Wonder where the other three are.”

  “Probably picking through the remains of Caishen and Enmerkar just about now.” Soo-jin curled further into her chair. “I hope your sister gives us an update. I'm really curious.”

  Last they’d seen, Agni, a cruiser in the Fallon fleet, had been going broadside with the Alliance cruiser Enmerkar. Alliance-run Caishen station had sat nearby with a full range of weaponry, but even the two-to-one odds hadn’t thrown the match in the Alliance’s favor. Fallon’s ships were simply too good.

  Since the Alliance had, at the time, been going after and actively trying to capture the Nemina, they hadn’t stuck around to find out what happened.

  “So am I.” As a notification appeared on her screen, Karin sat up in her seat and reached for the rest of the dashboard, keying in the right permissions. A low rumble sounded, then a small nudge jerked her seat as the two ships docked together. She swiped away the next notification and stood. “Guess it's time to find out.”

  Marc made to step back, then hesitated as she swayed, his free hand shooting out into the air between them. She steadied before he could reach her. Sudden dizziness rolled through the front of her mind. She dug her fingers into the plastic-leather of the seat's back as her vision blotted out in a wave of static, sucking in a breath.

  When it receded, Marc's tight, anxious expression had softened into a brow-furrowed worry.

  “Stood up too fast. I'm all right.”

  His expression changed little, and his wary gaze drove a needle of guilt into her chest that she couldn't quite stifle. She gave him her best 'no, really, I'm all right' smile—hard to do, considering she had spent the previous sixteen hours in medical rest—and went to step past. His hand brushed her arm, but he made no move to stop her.

  A tickle of dust came to her nose as she passed the junction in the middle of the ship and that split into the hall that lead to Cargo One. As she went past Med on her right and several engineering access points on her left, the hexagonal corners in the ceiling gave the place a squarish, vintage look as opposed to the straight-cut, inset walls in the bridge and residential sections.

  Boxes came into sight around the next corner, stacked waist-high and trailing along the wall toward Cargo One. The netting, formerly holding the stores inside the nook to the locked hatch, had been pulled back and hooked into two anchor points in the ceiling that she hadn't noticed before. Its black roping looked like a nest of twisted spiders' legs against the cream-tinged backdrop.

  Something bumped on the other side of the airlock. A shock of brown-black hair caught her attention through the port hole—Nomiki, head turned away, talking to someone over her shoulder.

  For a second, memory flashed through her. The last time she and Nomiki had been together had been on Enlil in the sunlight, her sister seeing her off at the main aerospace hub in Hegir-Nuna. A wide-brimmed hat had shaded her face, but her loose blouse and shirt, along with the thin gold necklace she'd worn that day, had caught the sun's rays. No tears as Karin had left, but a bitterness to her smile that she'd tried to hide.

  She could see enough of her sister through the window to know that the peacetime clothes were gone.

  A finger prodded into Karin's shoulder. She glanced back to find Marc and Soo-jin behind her, Cookie just out of sight around the corner.

  “She's your homicidal sister,” Soo-jin said, a lopsided smile pulling up the corner of her mouth. “You get to open the door.”

  “Thanks.”

  With a slap at the lock panel and a keyed-in code, the airlock hissed open.

  “—I'm sure she'll heal Nell. I mean, if she can heal them at all, she will heal her.” Nomiki took half a step over the threshold and glanced over, catching Karin's gaze. “Right?”

  “Er…” Karin hesitated, gaze darting from her sister to… who was she talking to? No one else stood in the airlock.

  “Sure,” she said. “I can heal her.”

  “See?” Nomiki said, directing her voice up toward the ceiling. “My sister's nice.”

  “A lot nicer than you, anyway.”

  Understanding clicked as the reply came through the other ship's internal comms—the pilot, keeping in on the conversation while he… did whatever needed to be done at the bridge. Her eyebrows arched, but she withheld her judgment.

  After a second, her gaze dropped back down to Nomiki.

  Four months. That's how long it'd been since they'd separated on Enlil. And no contact for almost two of them. Their lifestyles led to periods like that. With Karin on long, distant space voyages and Nomiki an assassin for hire, they both had their times when they went black. Four months didn't even count as the longest. The last time Nomiki had gone on a major mission, it'd been six months before she'd wandered back into Karin’s life again.

  She seemed healthy, anyway. However long she'd spent in transit hadn't diminished the tan on her skin. A warmer tone than Karin's near-sickly pale, with a shading provided by some more Hispanic parts in her DNA origins. Standing about an inch taller, she raised her eyes by an increment, the slight change in air pressure between the two ships making some loose hairs around her face sway. They used to joke that the doctors had got them wrong. Nomiki should have been the sun, and Karin should have been the killer.

  But then, they'd grown up, and apart. And their abilities had manifested.

  “Hi.” Nomiki gave a flippant gesture over her shoulder. “That's Reeve. He'll be along in a sec. Has to send off a report. You know how it is with the military.”

  “Don't diss the process,” Reeve said. “It hasn't failed us yet.”

  “You don't know that.” Th
e whites of her eyes showed as she rolled them toward the ceiling. Then she tilted her head and took another step in, shoulders in an almost cat-like lean, gaze dropping past Karin to focus on the people behind her. She lifted a finger. “So, him, I know about because I'm a snoop,” she said, pointing to Marc. “But the rest of them…”

  “Soo-jin and Cookie.” Karin swung her body parallel to the wall to give Nomiki more access. “They know about us and Seirlin.”

  “Ah.” Nomiki paused. “Well, you know—I'd hope so, given what I assume they've seen you do.” She straightened, having drawn even with Karin now, and turned her gaze back to her, giving her another assessing look. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks, sis.” A half-smile tugged at the corners of her lips, but in the next second, a piece of raw emotion bubbled up through her chest, giving it a sardonic edge. “Hey,” she said, trying to keep the tone light. “Have you been investigating Seirlin without me?”

  Nomiki's lips pulled tighter, the smile stiff. Her eyes sharpened, now giving Karin her entire focus. A couple of beats passed before she answered. “Maybe. How'd you find out?”

  “I found a book under your bed.”

  That brought out a snort. “What? You looked under my bed? In my house? How'd you get in?”

  “Your apartment manager is too nice and trusting.”

  “Christ.” She blew out a breath, hunching to close her eyes and pinch the bridge of her nose. “You know, I liked that place. I don't want to move.”

  “Then don't.”

  “Yeah, but if you got in…”

  “I have the advantage of being your sister. And you gave me the address.”

  “Right. Whatever.” She blew out another breath, then unwound, relaxing her shoulders back and dropping her arms to cross over her chest. “I guess we have a lot to talk about. Your ship or mine?”

  “Ours,” Marc said. “I've arranged the Mess.”

  “Perfect.” Nomiki turned back and yelled over her shoulder. “Reeve, we're starting without you.”

  Chapter 2