She felt cold. She hated the Guild, but she would never destroy it. And maybe hate was too strong a word. She hated parts of the Guild, the parts that trapped her, the parts that assumed she could be a killer. The parts that seemed arbitrary.
But she appreciated parts of it too. She respected a lot of her teachers—not the ones who taught assassination, but the ones who taught history and languages and survival skills. She loved the buildings and the gardens. She liked a lot of the people she had grown up with.
She wouldn’t purposefully harm any of them.
But maybe that was because she wasn’t an assassin. Maybe someone with assassin training and the same hatred for parts of the Guild would try to destroy it.
“I don’t want to be the one to save the Guild,” she said.
“Then ignore all of this,” Jack said.
She shook her head. “That’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t.”
Chapter 34
Skye felt more unsettled than she had when she first touched Jack. Strange how his words unnerved him more than that instant connection had.
Perhaps his words unsettled her because they echoed what she had been thinking. He hit on the same analysis she’d been doing with herself before she saw Liora Olliver talking with Heller.
Skye hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it afterwards. She’d been a bit relieved to focus on Jack.
She took a bite of her squished-down sandwich. The ham was real and so was the cheese. All the ingredients were better than any she’d had off-planet. This place amazed her.
Jack ate too. He seemed to understand her need to reflect.
He finished his sandwich quicker than she did. Then he pushed his plate away, with a lot of food left on it.
“Here’s one piece of information you need to know,” he said. “Heller does the pricier jobs himself. He only deploys a team when he’s convinced that one person can’t do the job.”
“I figured.” Skye didn’t want to sound dismissive, but she understood how jobs worked. Even the Guild deployed a team when the job sounded too hard for one person.
She took another bite of her sandwich. The food was restorative. She felt less tired than she had.
Jack didn’t seem disturbed by her terse response. He said, “Part of what he’s trying to do is become the go- to squad for various governments. He told me once that every government needs an extra-legal organization to do its dirty work. He wants the—um—his people to be that.”
Skye frowned. Everyone believed that the Rovers already did such jobs. Now she was paying attention.
Jack had just told her that the Rovers had once been different. It explained a lot. It explained how he could seem so honorable and yet work for them.
“You mean that’s new?” she asked.
“Since Heller,” Jack said. “And just in the last few years. Despite what everyone thinks, the organization wasn’t bad. Not really. There were always bad guys affiliated with the group, but they didn’t last long.”
“If the group has no rules, how could that happen?” Skye asked.
Jack twirled his glass in his hands. “What I was told is that those guys had an inordinate number of accidents.”
“That didn’t bother you?” she asked. She felt a bit emotionally whiplashed. She thought she understood him, and then he would say something that surprised her, so she understood that, and then he would say something like this about the accidents.
That would bother her. The Guild reprimanded people: it didn’t help them meet with “accidents.”
“It didn’t bother me at the time,” Jack said. As he spoke, her heart sank. Had she read him wrong?
“I knew some of those bad guys. The ‘accidents’ were often quick, efficient, and better than they deserved.”
She understood that. She had felt that way about a lot of the people she investigated. Part of her was quite harsh: she believed some people just needed to leave the universe to improve it.
But she also felt really uncomfortable with assassination as the way to do it. She had said so back at the Guild. It played with dangerous things, and she had protested that. She had protested her part of that.
Death by hire, even if it was legal or nearly legal, crossed certain lines, lines she didn’t like, lines she couldn’t participate in.
She felt like a hypocrite sometimes, but she truly didn’t know a better system. So she made sure that her lines remained firm.
By providing information, she made certain that the right people (or the worst people, in truth) got assassinated, while those with indeterminate guilt or no guilt went free.
She never asked what happened to them when the Guild refused the contract, however. Did those who wanted that person dead go to the Rovers? She didn’t know the answer to that question, and she doubted Jack did either.
They would have to research it, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She had a hunch she might not like the answer.
“So what changed your mind about your group?” she asked, still avoiding the word
“Too many people who were innocent died,” he said. “I did the research before the jobs, and Heller or someone accepted the job anyway, even if I recommended against it. Then I found out about this extra-legal thing. Here’s the problem: if you work for a government, the government sets the agenda. The government might despise a group of people for their religion or the clothes they wear or the fact that they are peaceful dissidents. Neither group—yours or mine—should be involved in things like that.”
His voice had lowered, yet it sounded even more passionate than it had earlier. He was gripping the glass so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.
This really upset him.
She let out a small breath. She understood that upset. She related to it, and it made Jack a good guy to her. It confirmed the sense she had.
He seemed shocked by the fact that the Rovers had instituted the change. She wasn’t, but mostly because she had always thought the Rovers did things like that.
She had been more surprised that everything she had known about the Rovers in the past wasn’t true.
“Forgive me for asking this,” she said, “but you’re telling me this is a change of policy?”
“Yes,” he said with quiet force.
He moved the glass near the plate. She got the sense he had done that to avoid crushing the glass between his powerful hands. Then he grabbed the rest of the dishes and replaced them on that part of the table that had delivered them.
“I know what people believe,” he said, “and it was never true. When I was part of it all, we let the rumors stand because it made us more unpredictable. It also brought in certain kinds of work that no one would approach the Guild with—not extra-legal work, but dicier jobs, the kind we specialized in. I would investigate, and if I said no, this wasn’t our mission, this didn’t fall into the kind of legal work that the governments in the sector looked away from or never prosecuted or even encouraged, then we didn’t take the job. Back then, my group listened to me.”
“And they don’t now,” she said.
“It’s worse than that,” Jack said. “It’s not about my ego. I could handle it if it were. Now they take the jobs I recommend against, and they ignore the other jobs. They let you guys handle those.”
His fingers tapped on the tabletop. As they did, the food dishes he had placed on the side disappeared.
He looked at the mechanism in shock, then leaned back in his chair, hands off the table.
“All of that changed under Heller,” she said.
“Yes,” Jack said with that quiet forcefulness. “It changed, and then it changed again. Now it’s so bad that it
