her. No one should be as pessimistic and sad as she was. Not for any reason.
“So, Miss Empty Glass, are we in the clear?” he asked, trying to keep the tone light.
“For the next hour or two,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Then sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
She glanced at herself, then chuckled. “I’m just making you stand.”
“That too,” he said. “You know, someday, I’m going to build myself a custom ship, one with plenty of room, so I don’t spend my entire life hunched.”
“You could spend your entire life planetside,” she said. “Then you have an actual sky above you and you wouldn’t have to worry about banging your head.”
He gave her a wolfish grin. “I like having a Skye above me, and I rather enjoy banging.”
She looked at him sideways, her luscious mouth upturned just a bit. “Focus,” she said. “We’ll need all the energy we can get to survive going to Zaeen.”
“I’m not familiar with it,” he said.
“I haven’t been there in nearly two decades,” she said. “But I’ve been checking it out—”
“In your copious spare time, as you research me, this ship, and the criminal who owns the ship,” Jack said.
That upturn became a smile. He liked it when she smiled. It made her dark eyes light up.
“No,” she said. “Before I met you, I’d been researching Zaeen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” she said. “It was the last place I ever saw my parents.”
He let that sink in. He would have thought the last place she ever saw her parents was Kordita, where the Assassins Guild was. Someone had to drop her off there.
“And you were a child,” he said.
She nodded, her chin set. He recognized that look too. It was a common one among the children in Tranquility House, particularly among those kids who believed that their parents would come back for them.
Of course, the idiot parents never did.
Jack sighed. Sometimes he could be a glass-half-empty kinda guy, particularly when it came to parenting. Humans had been around for millennia, and a large portion of the human race never seemed to master parenting at all.
You’d think there’d be some kind of rule book or something, and first in it would be,
But then, that would be too difficult for most of these bastards.
“That surprise you?” she asked.
“Nothing surprises me.” He was lying. He had just surprised himself. He should have mentioned his own childhood, the fact that he couldn’t even remember his own parents and he had no idea why they dropped him at Tranquility House. Even though he’d tried to research it, he never found a trace of them.
It would have helped if he had known his real name.
Or theirs.
“They gave me to a so-called uncle who was supposed to take me to Kordita to wait for them. My father thought he could work with the Guild, or so he said. He figured they needed thieves. My uncle kept me for half a year before just giving me to the Guild.”
She said it all matter-of-factly, but Jack could tell it hurt.
“Did you ever figure out what happened?” he asked.
She looked at him, her face bleak. He recognized that expression too. Kids often got it too young, when they knew that the people they cared about the most never cared about them.
“To my parents?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Exactly what happened every time before when they dumped me. They figured they found a sucker who could take the kid, and they’d be able to live kid-free and unencumbered for the rest of their days.” She shrugged, as if trying to pretend that it didn’t hurt. “Guess they finally accomplished that.”
He wasn’t sure he could ever encounter those people. They’d tried to abandon their daughter more than once? He’d heard of parents like that from the kids at Tranquility House but he had always accepted it as part of those kids’ lives. He had been young and hadn’t thought about the kind of pain it caused.
Clearly, for Skye, the pain remained, much as she pretended otherwise.
And then things at the Guild hadn’t worked out either. No wonder she liked working alone. He would have too in her situation.
He felt a brief moment of amusement. He liked working alone as well, for similar reasons.
He hoped that amusement hadn’t shown on his face, because it had been directed at himself, not at her.
“And this so-called uncle,” he said. “He didn’t…”
“Want me?” Skye said. “Of course not. I’m the proverbial unwanted kid. Or I was.”
The present tense was telling as well. She still saw herself as that abandoned child.
Well, he saw himself the same way. Maybe that was why they had such a deep connection.
“I was actually going to ask if he hurt you,” Jack asked.
“By dumping me off?” She turned toward Jack with such surprise that he could feel it as if it were his own. “I felt no attachment to him.”
“No,” Jack said gently. “Sometimes ‘uncle’ is a euphemism for a man who has expectations of a certain kind of sexual—”
“Ew,” she said. “No.
She shook her head as if trying to get an image out of her brain.
“No,” she said a third time. “I won’t say he was a good man, because he was a friend of my parents and he did similar things to make money, but he actually tried to do right by me. Leaving me at the Guild was smart on his part, since my father said they’d eventually show up.”
Then her mouth flattened. She ran a hand over her face.
“But,” she said, “if no one had ever opened that gate for me, I would have been completely alone. He walked off before they took me in.”
So the so-called uncle wasn’t a good man after all. Just a better man than Skye’s father. But Jack didn’t make the commentary. It wasn’t his to judge.
She looked at the navigation panel in front of her. “I never really thought I’d go back to Zaeen.”
Yet she’d been investigating it. Jack almost didn’t ask about it, but he was ever curious, and he couldn’t quite restrain himself.
“Even though you’d been researching it,” he said.
She lowered her head, laughed once—an odd almost reluctant sound—and then leaned back in her chair.
“I could tell you a partial truth,” she said. “I could tell you I’ve been checking up on them for years.”
“Seeing if they came back to Zaeen?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Had they?”
She shook her head. “Not using any identification that I could find,” she said. “Doesn’t mean they don’t have aliases I don’t know.”
He nodded. He understood that.
“Why is that a partial truth?” he asked.
“Because—” She glanced at him, her expression speculative. He could almost sense her trying to figure out just how much of her own life she wanted to trust him with. “Because I’m going to be done with the Guild in a couple of years, and then I want to find them.”
“And do what?” he asked.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t know, exactly. Show them what they missed? See if they even think about me? Get them arrested? The one thing I know I can’t do is kill them. I’m not that person.”
“Although you’re still that angry,” he said.
