Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes

Author:Valerie Valdes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Curiosity Kills

If the xana in the lobby was surprised to see Eva, he didn’t say anything, and his psychic emanations were as deferential and eager to please as they had been when she arrived. He tried to assure her that there were many excellent food options in the building when she asked, but she insisted right back that she wanted to take a walk outside, and eventually he directed her to a few potential restaurant equivalents nearby. She felt the barest sour twinge from him when she was far enough away that he probably didn’t think she would notice.

Eva had a feeling there would be Watchers dogging her every step, and she wasn’t wrong. They weren’t especially subtle, so she assumed there were more of them she couldn’t see loitering elsewhere, or monitoring the surveillance devices stationed regularly throughout the streets.

She thought of all the apparently sleeping people in Damaal’s office and her skin flashed hot and cold.

Speaking of cold, the weather was almost absurdly pleasant to her human perceptions. Not too warm, not too chill, a light breeze drifting in from the nearby ocean that brought with it smells both salty and oddly sweet. The local star slowly sank into the water, turning the sky a brilliant shade of teal darkening to velvety blue, and leaving a coppery orange shimmer on the tip of every wave like tongues of flame. The surface was occasionally breached, whether by wildlife or tourists she couldn’t tell from so far away, and keening songs echoed softly over the broad swath of sand separating nature from civilization.

Other tourists were enjoying the scenery as well, meandering from place to place with no apparent destination in mind, some of them with Pod Pals of their own. She and Vakar mimicked them, walking slowly, leisurely, as if they had nowhere to be, which wasn’t entirely untrue. But they were also both surveying their surroundings, assessing threat levels, all the little habits picked up from years of training and being thrown into the deep end of space to see if they could swim. He’d just been an engineer when she met him, and she’d been the captain of a small ship whose business was composed entirely of side hustles, but they both had secrets in their pasts that lurked below the surface like whatever was out there in the ocean.

His secrets, at least, were nobler. A Wraith was basically a glorified cop, but unlike the petty stungun-wielding assholes Eva was used to dealing with, Vakar had been using his skills and resources to harass The Fridge. He was a tool of the quennian government, yes, but over and over again he had proven that his ethics and loyalties were more complex than any simple tool. While he had been on her crew, he had followed orders as long as she never gave bad ones, and heaven knew she had tried to honor that. Now, he mostly did the same, but with a different set of bosses.

Eva, for

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