Ghost in the Machine (Corwint Central Agent Files) Read online

  Ethan wasn’t sure how he should feel about those memories. Thankfully, she had kept the actual events of that evening locked away from what she was sharing with him, but the kiss had been real enough. The idea that Hank’s father had given Orynn her first kiss, and then her first... Ethan looked back down at her.

  There had been no emotion with that memory. Of all the emotional torrents she had shown to him, that one was shockingly void of it. She had used Hankarron to explore new physical connections, but she had felt nothing beyond friendship for him.

  Ethan suddenly understood. She had used Hankarron.

  “You did what?” Jehdra stopped unpacking her large tote bag and stared open mouthed at Orynn. Orynn’s face went bright red and she averted her eyes to the floor. Jehdra sighed and put her fists on her hips.

  “Oh honey, I thought I told you to stay outta trouble till I got here.” She shifted her weight to her other foot and threw the pair of socks she was holding into the open dresser drawer. “And I specifically remember telling you not to do anything with him I wouldn’t do, and trust me, I certainly wouldn’t of done that!”

  “It is wrong to do these things?” Orynn’s embarrassment shifted to concern.

  “No, no... now don’t go getting the wrong idea.” Jehdra shook her next pair of socks at Orynn’s face, then tossed them into the drawer. “A good romp in the sheets every now and again is certainly a healthy thing, even if that's all it is.” Jehdra moved her empty tote bag to the corner and walked over to the chair Orynn had curled into. “But only if that’s all it is for both persons involved.”

  Orynn shook her head in frustration and lowered her eyes. “I do not understand.”

  Jehdra let out a slow breath and shook her head. The poor kid was like some teenager whose parents had neglected to tell her about the larps and the tagflies. Sitting in the chair, Orynn was almost eye level with her. She softened the accusatory look in her black eyes and lightly touched Orynn’s hand. “Hankarron is in love with you.”

  Orynn looked up slowly. Her heart raced, but her head was a jumbled confusion. “Love?”

  “Big time.” Jehdra crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s been following you around like a planthor hound since you came on board. I thought perhaps after the whole deal about who you were happened, he would lose the trail. Instead, the damn fool fell off the deep end. You seriously couldn’t tell? The whole damn crew seemed to notice how he kept making googly eyes at you.”

  “No.” Orynn shook her head. “I swear, I did not know.” She thought on that for a moment, reflecting on the times she had spent with Hankarron and how each encounter had made her feel, deep in her heart. Slowly, she understood Jehdra’s words, and her heart broke with what she had done.

  “He is a good man, and a good friend, but I do not love him. Oh Jehdra, what have I done?”

  Jehdra watched as Orynn curled more deeply into the chair and started crying. She was trembling, like a small child who had done something so shameful she was afraid of what would happen to her. Jehdra patted her head gently. “It’ll be ok, honey, but you have to tell him it was a misunderstanding. It will probably break that damn fool’s heart, but you have to tell him.”

  She would never get the chance to tell Hankarron that it had been a mistake and how sorry she was for letting it happen. After her talk with Jehdra, she had immediately set out to find him, but the maid told her that he had gone fishing at the lake with Jhonis and Jarren. Thinking it would be a bad idea to run after him and cause a scene, she found the solarium and fell asleep in a plush high-back chair. It was near sunset when she awoke to the presence behind her.

  A reflection of the fading sunlight across a metallic surface being lowered in front of her face caused her to leap out of the chair with a startled gasp. She refocused her eyes in the dim light to find Keith standing next to the chair holding a strange round object. When it dawned on her what it was, she took a step back. “Where did you get that?”

  Keith took a step forward and held up the collar. “So you know what this is, do you? Good. That will make this easy then.”

  Her anger flared and she narrowed her eyes at him. She gathered the anger in the pit of her stomach and pushed it out toward him to cloud his mind. A sharp pain erupted in her aura and she stumbled back holding her head. She heard Keith’s menacing laughter as he came closer.

  “Nice try, but I came prepared for your little tricks.” He tapped the side of his temple, then pushed the collar against her shoulder. “Now put the damn thing on.”

  “You are the one working with the Xen’dari.” She hissed through the pain. The feedback had been caused by a device only the Xen’dari had, and they kept a tight lock on it. Based on a Tarsen design, it was a neuro implant that inhibited her abilities. The Vesparian Sisterhood had been trying for centuries to destroy anything to do with the devices.

  He glared and drew his gun from its holster. He raised the setting on it and aimed it at her. “Put on the fucking collar.”

  “No.” Orynn looked at the collar in his outstretched hand.

  The collar was designed to completely inhibit a Vesparian from using their abilities by keeping the energies of their auras in a constant state of flux. The one thing the Xen’dari had apparently not overcome was the fact that in order for it to work, the Vesparian had to willingly put it on and attune her aura to it. It had a red light when it was inactive and a green light when working. Usually they held the Vesparian’s daughter at gunpoint, but it was just her and Keith in the room. He obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  He growled and fired his gun. It singed the wood window frame behind her, leaving a black, charred hole and a waft of smoke. “They said they wanted you alive, but I think they’d be okay with just having a corpse to study.”

  Orynn regained herself as the pain passed, and she stood up and faced him. She would rather die than put that collar around her neck. “Why are you doing this?”

  “What’s going on?” Jhonis’s bellowing voice filled the room as he and Hankarron rushed into the solarium from the doorway behind Keith.

  Zera came running in from a side entrance with fright in her voice. “I heard a gunshot, Jhonis! Did you hear...” Zera stopped a few feet from Orynn and turned to the barrel of Keith’s gun. She let out a loud gasp. “Keith, what’s gotten into you?”

  “No one move!” Keith ground his teeth.

  “Get the damn gun out of her face!” Hankarron yelled at his brother and began walking towards Orynn.

  “Take one more step and she’s dead.” Keith hissed and Hankarron froze.

  Jhonis clenched his fists. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Me?” Keith laughed. “I’m the only one in this house thinking clearly. That bitch has twisted all of your minds, but I’m going to set you all free.”

  “What the fuck is all the ruckus?” Jehdra stepped into the room behind Zera with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand and a mouthful of food. As her eyes took in the situation, she stopped and swallowed. “Oh.”

  “Where is Jarren?” Orynn gave a sideways glance to Jehdra.

  “Don’t you dare say his name!” Keith’s grip on the gun tightened.

  Jehdra ignored Keith’s ranting with a calmness only a Hedarion could muster in a situation like this. “He’s in the kitchen with the cook helping her make dinner the old fashioned way. She’s already burned three pies in that old fire oven.” Her eyes looked over to Keith with an annoyed glare. She put one hand on her hip and shook her half eaten sandwich at him with the other. “So what crawled up your ass this morning, Keith?”

  Keith turned his angry glare to her. “Stay out of this.”

  Orynn took in a deep breath as her eyes fell to the collar in Keith’s hand and then moved to the rest of those in the room. Keith was acting in unpredictable anger and it was a risk to let it continue. She moved her hand toward him and he flinched. She stopped and let out the breath she had been holding. “I will put the collar on, Keith.”


  “Not happening.” Hankarron took another step forward as he glanced to Jhonis who had taken a step to the right. They nodded to each other in agreement that they had to put an end to this madness, but they needed a distraction. “What is that thing, Orynn?”

  Orynn noticed the brothers’ movements. It scared her for their safety, but she had to trust them. “It is a Xen’dari Velxkul - a collar designed to keep Trexen and Vesparians in line. If I put that on, I will not be able to use my abilities. He also has a Xen’dari neuro implant that has made him immune to me.”

  “Xen’dari?” Jhonis questioned. “Where did you get those devices, Keith?”

  Orynn’s eyes moved back to Keith. They turned cold and her voice grew bitter. “He is the Xen’dari spy my mother and I were originally sent to locate. He is the one who disabled the port shields that led to my mother’s death, and he aided in the death of countless Hedarions with the information he was giving the Xen’dari. Is that not true, Keith?”

  “Shut up!” Keith fired again in rage. This time the blast tore through the hair behind her left shoulder. Locks of her burned hair fell to the floor, but she did not move. “I have my reasons!”

  Jhonis and Hankarron both paused in their movements with Keith’s shot. Jhonis shook his head in disbelief. “Not my own brother! What possible reasons could you have?”

  “It was never supposed to be like this, dammit! His medical bills were just too much. I couldn’t pay them all and he wasn’t getting any better. They paid for it all in exchange for the smallest bit of intel. Half the shit I gave them was a lie, but they started to catch on. I had to help them take that station, or they were going to come after my son! Then, when I found out what the illness was and told them, they said they had a cure!” He growled at Orynn. “You lied, you bitch! You said there wasn’t a cure!”

  Orynn remained still. “I can assure you, it is the Xen’dari who are lying.”

  Keith ignored her. “When I told them we had a Vesparian, they went nuts! They offered me everything I could ever want, including to cure my son. All I need to do is deliver you to them and everything will be good again. So put on the Goddamned collar!”

  “Now!” Jhonis took the height of Keith’s rage filled ranting to make his move. Hankarron took aim at Keith’s midsection for a tackle while Jhonis took hold of the gun-wielding arm.

  Jehdra dropped her sandwich and ran over to help subdue Keith. Keith used his powerful anger to keep his grip tight on the gun against his brothers’ efforts. He glared at Orynn and steadied the weapon at her chest. A loud hateful yell erupted from him, tears clouding his vision as he took aim.

  His finger moved against the trigger.

  The blast left the barrel and echoed across the room.

  Everyone stopped and backed away from Keith as Orynn screamed. All eyes turned to her as she sank to her knees and pulled the lifeless body of Zera into her lap. Zera’s eyes were wide open, and a deep wound carving a path across her cheek and into her scalp was quickly bleeding out. Orynn fell into anguished sobs and rocked Zera’s body against her chest.

  “My wife!” Jhonis cried out and fell to his knees across from Orynn. “My dearest wife...” Jhonis took Zera’s body into his arms and stroked her blood matted hair. He buried his face in her dark tresses and kept whispering over and over. “My dearest wife... my happiness...”

  “God, no...” Hankarron shook his head at the scene, not wanting to believe what his eyes were showing him. He turned and looked at Keith, who still held the gun up with a shaking arm. “What have you done?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Keith’s anger had vanished into emptiness as he kept whispering the same phrase. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  Orynn continued rocking in place as she looked down at her empty blood stained lap. When Jhonis had taken Zera from her arms, something had come loose in Orynn’s left hand. She slowly opened her clenched fist and looked at the intricately carved shell hair clip sitting in her red palm.

  Orynn’s rocking stopped and she went rigid.

  With an exhale, all the air left her lungs as the darkness pulled her under.

  The light in the room dissipated under the gathering shadows of her aura. A black void deep inside of her, a violent energy she had fought so hard to keep away from her heart since that day in the burned fields of the Xen’dari colony, welled up and broke through to the surface. It fed on the wailing pain of Jhonis and her own seething hatred. Her fingers closed around the hair clip and she stood to her feet in one fluid motion. The mercury of her irises breached its containment, filling her eyes and reflecting the dissipating orange fire of the sunset as she turned her empty stare towards Keith.

  “Orynn?” Hankarron stepped forward and reached to her. A heavy lash wrapped around his chest and took his breath away. Its strong force caused him to fall into the chair behind him and pinned him there. “Orynn, stop!”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Keith was still whispering in shock, the gun still shaking in his unsteady hand.

  “Orynn, calm down.” Jehdra was stuck in place next to Keith. Orynn’s aura snaked its way up her legs, daring her to interfere. “It’ll be ok, hon. Just take a deep breath and let it go.” She tried to step between them, but her legs wouldn’t budge. “Orynn, please wake up!”

  “It wasn't supposed to be like this!” Keith’s voice raised in desperation as his mind tried to cope.

  “Veltu’azi o’sa brunnai.” We harvest only what we have planted.

  Orynn’s voice was the cold echoing hiss of the Wraith coiled around her heart as the old Vesparian saying was ushered past her lips. She walked steadily up to Keith, passing his outstretched arm so that the gun became level with her ear. She glanced to the side and looked at the black metal and the trembling hand holding onto it. Keith let out a sudden yell of pain and the gun dropped to the floor.

  The feedback Orynn received from the neuro implant in Keith’s brain dissipated into the abyss surrounding her heart. Her hand raised and slid along the man’s roughly bristled cheek and rested against his temple where the implant resided. His eyes were moving rapidly, but he was not seeing anything around him. The calls of Jehdra and Hankarron for her to stop were drowned out by the sound of Jhonis’s weeping.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Keith whispered one last time before the implant exploded through the back of his skull. His body fell into a crumpled heap at Orynn’s feet, and after a few jerking spasms, went still.

  “Papa!” Jarren’s cry tore through the room and shattered the shell of the void around Orynn’s heart into a thousand shards of cutting glass.

  Orynn took in a gasping breath of air into her burning lungs and trembled at the knees. She looked down at the body of Keith at her feet and let out a crying scream. Her hands raised to cover her mouth as the bile raised from her stomach. The movement of her hands stopped short of her lips as she saw the amount of blood on them.

  She turned to Jarren and his blue eyes destroyed her. He had seen her kill his father and the blood of Zera was all over her. She had become the monster of his nightmares. With a pale face of fear, he dropped the plate holding the pie he had brought to show them and ran out of the room.

  “Jarren, wait!” Jehdra ran out of the side door calling his name.

  Orynn shook her head as the world spun around her. She finally understood. Her mother had been so right. The rules of her people were there for a reason and she had been such a childish fool for trying to rebel against them. The Sisterhood had never come after her because they knew this was a lesson she could only learn the hard way; by letting her destroy everything she had built up around her in arrogance.

  Veltu’azi o’sa brunnai.

  “It was not supposed to be like this.”

  23 Truth

  Orynn’s feet slid across the carpet to stand over Jhonis. He appeared oblivious to the death of his brother, and he remained on the ground holding the lifeless body of his wife. Orynn
knelt down next to him and placed her right hand on his head. Her left hand continued to clutch tightly to Zera’s hair clip.

  “I am so very sorry.”

  Hankarron rose from the chair as the weight of her aura lifted from his chest. He knelt down beside her and looked down at his brother. Jhonis had always been the strength in their family, but now he was trembling, and the lost look in his hollow eyes seemed incapable of ever showing joy again.

  Hankarron placed his shaking hand on top of Orynn’s against his brother’s head. “We’ll get through this, somehow.”

  There was so much Orynn wanted to say to them. Her mother had been so right all along. Making connections with others was dangerous. She had caused this, and now she had to do the only thing she knew how to try and fix the chaos her ignorance had brought to their lives. In the end, none of what she wanted to say made it past her lips. In a world where she shouldn’t exist, those words did not matter.

  She had spent nearly eight months with them, allowing herself to take part in so many lives. She knew it would be impossible to hide herself completely from their memories without leaving large unexplainable gaps that could cause mental instability. She focused on hiding the ideas from their minds that dealt with her being Vesparian, and she tried her best to dispel any emotional attachments to her that she found. She blurred the night she had spent with Hankarron and turned it into an empty dream, and she even stole the kiss away from him. Even in her attempted act of kindness, she was a Wraith who stole away the happiness of others.

  The most recent events were raw and freshly scarred on both the brothers’ minds. She was able to remove herself completely from the room amid the emotional upheaval connected to what happened. She implanted the belief that she had been called back to Central that morning for an emergency mission that required her negotiation skills. It would instead be Zera who discovered Keith as he was sending a communication to his Xen’dari contact about the collar they had sent to him for his son’s illness. When Jhonis and Hankarron returned, Zera told them and showed the collar to them. They confronted Keith in the solarium, a fight ensued and Keith had accidentally shot Zera. In his grief at what he had done, Keith had then turned the gun on himself.