Chapter Thirteen

“Did I look fresh when I got to the bottom floor?” Iona asked Gage once they were alone in their suite.

The room they had been given was immaculate. Gorgeous beyond gorgeous. It was a blue velvet affair with blue curtains everywhere and exposed white marble everywhere else. The bed was a huge circle in the middle of the room that turned like a merry-go-round if you pushed on it.

“What is that for?” Iona wondered out loud.

“Orgies,” Gage replied. Then seeing the stricken look on her face he amended, “Or for fun. I could spin you on it if you’d like.”

“I’m good,” she said, settling herself into a chair sideways and putting out her white high heel so Gage would take them off for her.

“To answer your question, I was moved to the top floor, so I didn’t see you when you were on the bottom floor. I saw you when you were on your way up though. You should be proud. There wasn’t a model there who was more alluring than you.” Obediently, he slid her shoe off and reached for the other one.

“But I saw you on the bottom floor,” Iona countered. “You had a red tint in your hair and you gave me the flirtiest smile ever. Why are you denying being there?”

Gage dropped her shoe on the floor with a thud and backed away from her. “You saw me on the bottom floor? You’re sure?”

“Yeah, our eyes locked for an eternity and I did an extra little twirl for you.”

Gage turned away from her and thought hard. If the guy had red hair, was it Leviticus or Invocation? Maybe neither. Gage had lost track of most of them over the decades. Not only that but he had hoped to lose them coming all the way to the middle of nowhere. Were the Jovian moons so popular now that he had to move further out? He planned to retire to Lapetus, but maybe it was time to take a detail between the moons around Saturn. The Neptune moons were so far out that the joint wasn’t yet civilized, but to get away from those guys, he’d take a job on Makemake beyond Pluto if that got him away from them.

“Iona,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “Was there anything distinctive about the guy you saw beside the fact that his hair was tinted red? Was he wearing colored contact lenses or glasses? Can you describe him for me?”

“He was wearing sunglasses. Was that really not you?” she asked, perplexed.

“Nah. It wasn’t me. There are a few guys running around who look quite a bit like me. I wonder which one it was.” Gage stopped and considered. Did he need to tell her more about what was happening in his life in order to make it through the next few weeks? If he was thinking about threats, the biggest one wasn’t the guys who looked like him. “Hey,” he said, changing the subject. “If you get a bid from a woman named Olivine, please promise you won’t take it, no matter how much money is offered.”

“I’ve never had a woman bid on me who wasn’t bidding on behalf of a company. It’s on my file that I’m straight and I don’t accept contracts from women.”

“All the same, please don’t take a contract from someone you don’t know on this round. I met one of my previous owners at the show. That’s the reason for this room and the deluxe food provisions I secured for us for the flight to Io. Sleeping Beauty Inc. arranged for her to meet me even though she is the last person I would ever want to meet. She told me she was going to bid on you. Whatever is said in the contract will more than likely not be honored and what will happen to you in her care will not be something you’ll be able to shrug off.”

Iona brought her knees to her chest and hugged them. “That sounds really scary. I’ve never had a contract violated before.”

“Let’s keep it that way. If there’s anything I could say that would stop you from taking a contract with Sherman, I’d say it. I don’t trust that things will be kept above board with him. He’s a baby who always gets his way. That’s why Jessica is leaving.”

“Of course, bad stuff that happens. You think I haven’t had bad stuff happen to me doing this stuff?” Iona refuted.

“Yeah. I imagine you haven’t had a great time, but people with that much money are different and they might ask you to do stuff you never thought of. You didn’t think to ask for it to be excluded from the contract because you didn’t know people did that. I’d prefer it if you didn’t learn about it. Please take another corporate contract.”

She stuck her nose in the air. “What did you think of Dante? He came to the show. Did you see him?”

“I saw him. He wants to be a mini Sherman. Forget him too. Take another corporate contract.”

“What about Benediction?”

Gage was uncomfortable, but he hoped he could change her mind about going to see him altogether. “Uh… I know him.”

“You know him?” she asked, gobsmacked.

“He won’t offer you a contract. He would never offer you a contract. If you went to him, he’d have your skin torched black, the pigment drained from your eyes, and chemicals inserted in your skull so that your hair turns forest green forever. I don’t want to see you like that. I don’t want you to end up like one of his followers. Not only that, he’d drain your assets so that you didn’t have a penny to your name and then defile you with pointless purification rituals.”

“You know him?” she asked again, still horrified.

“He doesn’t need a model from Sleeping Beauty Inc. He needs followers. If you go there that’s all he’ll see you as, a potential follower.”

“Why are you only telling me this now?” she asked, suddenly standing up to face him.

“Once you see him in the flesh, I’m not going to be able to hide anymore.”

“Why? What are you trying to hide?”

Gage’s face transformed into an angry snarl. “My face, my body, the exact shape of my nose, my vocal cords, my kidneys, my liver, my heart! You name it, I’m trying to hide it.”

“Why?”

He dropped his hands. “Haven’t you noticed I’m a little too perfect?”

“Of course!” she agreed, warmth spreading on her face because they were finally talking about something she understood.

He put up a hand, deciding for the second time not to talk to her about the truth of his circumstances. He needed to downplay it. “He’s my brother,” Gage hedged, trying to make his breathing normal. The truth was Benediction was not his brother, but their genetic code was identical, so it was like they were twins.

Iona looked at him. “All the more reason for us to go see him. You can introduce me to him.”

“I’m not on good terms with him!” Gage spat.

“If Benediction is your brother, then who is the guy I saw on the bottom level of the stage?”

“Another brother,” Gage said, thinking he couldn’t have sounded less credible if he tried. “So princess, you should understand that if you’re in love with me for my face, you have a number of other options.”

“How many brothers do you have?”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Oh, enough that you could shop around.”

Gage wasn’t expecting it, but that was the moment when their dinner arrived. The server tapped on the door, Iona opened it, and the server arranged their food on the dining room table only a few feet from the bed.

Gage smiled pleasantly at the server until the food was all out. When they were finished, they left and shut the door firmly behind them.

“Don’t touch this food, Iona,” he said coldly once the server was gone.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s laced in more drugs than you’d find under the floorboards at a crack house,” Gage said coldly.

“Why would they drug us?”

“It might not be Sleeping Beauty Inc. exactly who has done this, but they’re allowing it because they can’t offend Olivine Bouvant. She’s a monster and if she owns enough shares in the company, they might not be able to do anything about this.”

“Who is she?” Iona asked, but Gage had already crossed the room and taken her hand in his.

“We can’t stay here. Let’s get back to the ship. We need to get into orbit. Forget your shoes. Just come barefoot. We’ll take the stairs. We’re going to need to run.”

Outside the suite, there was a security guard posted. It was a woman leaning against the wall. When their door opened, she got on her earpiece and Gage could hear her explaining to someone on the other end of the line that the target was on the move. Gage glanced back at her. She wasn’t going to try to stop them. All that would have amounted to was a broken nose for her and where could he go? This was Europa.

“Change of plan,” Gage said as he pushed Iona into the open elevator. “Let’s take as many floors as we can this way.”

The doors closed.

“We can go all the way to the ship through this elevator,” Iona pointed out as she pressed a button to take them directly to the Cannonball III.

Gage shook his head. “We can press that button, but we won’t get all the way there before there’s someone to catch us. I hope the other me isn’t in this tower. He won’t like Olivine any more than I did.”

He leaped up and grabbed the light fixture that was hanging from the ceiling of the elevator and pulled himself up to the ceiling. With one hand, he opened the emergency flap in the ceiling.

“Won’t an alarm go off if you open that?” Iona asked in a sound that was almost a screech.

“Probably. But an alarm went off when we left the suite. Another alarm will go off when we get to the ship and a whole whack load of alarms will go off once we blast off.”

“I can’t believe Madam Damsel would do this to us.”

“I told you, she’s not doing this,” he said, pulling himself through the emergency hatch. “She’s powerless to stop this. But I’m not powerless and if there’s one fricking thing I’m not doing with my life, it’s spending one more minute with that elephant woman. Now jump, you little acrobat. I’ll catch you.”

She tried a few times but was met with harsh disappointment. She breathed hard and explained her problem. “It’s hard to jump in an elevator. The floor is moving up while I’m jumping,” she carped.

“I’ll slow it down for you,” he said, fiddling with a set of controls on the outside of the elevator as it sped upwards.

True to his word, it slowed down and Iona leaped high enough to catch his fingers. With an effort that made Gage’s face red, he pulled her up through the hatch. Once she was out, he replaced the section of ceiling he’d removed and he kept the elevator going at the same slow pace.

“I don’t know how many people will be chasing us, but they’ll have people at the top by our ship, and on the floor where we slowed things down.”

“Do you have a plan for getting on board the Cannonball III if they’re going to be waiting for us?” she panted.

“Yup. There are half a dozen ways to get on board without being noticed by security.”

“Such as?”

“If we can get some utility uniforms, we can unload a few empty cryochambers and when we get back on board for more, we lock down the ship and leave. We can say we’re loading cargo and leave once the cargo is locked down. No matter what, they don’t want the Cannonball III sitting around like an idiot. Spaceships die if they’re not in space. They’re made for space, not hanging out here on the surface of a world, so we could even get on board in utility uniforms and tell them it’s our job to get it into orbit.”

“Could you trick the security guards into letting you do that?”

“Yes. Although, I do keep thinking about little red-haired me. I hope he doesn’t get caught by that nutjob.”

The elevator came to an abrupt halt. Gage put a finger to his mouth to tell Iona that it was time to be quiet as whoever entered inspected the elevator. Gage couldn’t see them at all, but he heard the muffled sound of their voices as they inspected the empty elevator.

When the elevator doors started to close with the inspectors inside, still talking, the elevator was ordered down and Gage literally scooped Iona off the floor and threw her at a horizontal I-beam that was part of the elevator shaft. She landed badly, but quietly, sagging against the wall. Gage followed but, but missed her beam and got the one under it.

“Are you okay?” he whispered to her.

“I am. Gage,” she said, matching his tone. He couldn’t see her, except for a tendril of her hair that spilled over the edge of the beam. “There’s a camera pointed at me.”

He put his hands around the beam and did a chin-up that brought him up to her level. He looked at the thing she was referring to. “That’s not a camera. It’s the home of a very powerful laser beam.”

“That’s supposed to comfort me?”

“It comforts me. They’re not for us. They’re for those,” he said, pointing toward an armored lizard that scuttled across a beam on the other side of the elevator shaft.

The machine Iona had been pointing to changed directions and fired at it. The thing was burnt to a crisp and left as a pile of ash and bones.

Iona gasped and grabbed Gage’s arm. “If that laser is shooting anything that moves, will it shoot at us too?”

“Relax,” he said, soothing her by stroking her hand in his. “They’re not programmed to kill people. The control room won’t be able to track us through that laser’s movements because they don’t keep information about rillos in the air ducts.”

“Why not?”

“Frankly because there are too many of them to keep count. We’re going to see a lot more of them down here and the lasers intended to kill them will be few and far between.”

“Will these rillos hurt us?” Iona asked, staring at the pile of ash.

“Maybe. They’re pests indigenous to Europa. Before humans settled the place, rillos had very few places that matched their needs, but it turns out that an upside-down tower with air kept a little warmer than the warmest places on the moon gave them a collection of perfect habitats. The first worst thing about them is that they have very little bladder control, so every downward surface we’ll touch is coated in a little bit of their pee. The second worst thing is that their saliva is slightly poisonous when it’s fresh and five licks from one will likely see a person of your weight unconscious. Their tongues shoot out far.”

“How many licks would it take you?”

“I dunno. More than five,” he said hopefully as he examined his surroundings.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked, looking around for a path that made sense.

“How acrobatic are you really?” Gage asked her with a sly look on his face. “If we can go upwards, we can cut across to the cargo bay two floors beneath where the ship is docked. Take a look. Can you get yourself up safely?”

Iona looked upward skeptically. “Not in this dress.”

“What have you got on under it?”

“Panties. No bra.”

“Not even a strapless one?”

Iona cleared her throat. “I would have loved to have worn a bra, but it would have tugged at my back fat. Do you know how much back fat a woman has to have before her bra pinches at it and makes her look like the bra is barely containing her rolls of fat?”

“Like none,” he answered with a sympathetic shrug.

“Yeah. Like none.”

Gage started pulling at the buttons of his shirt. “Wear mine and get out of that dress.”

Iona winced. “I can’t get myself out of it on my own. I need you to undo me. Can you do that, Mr. Chastity?”

He sighed in annoyance. “Of course, I can do that. I’m great with naked people. I never want to screw them.”

“Oh yeah,” she said as she turned her back toward him and let him undo her zipper.

“This is the smallest zipper I’ve ever seen,” he said as he fumbled with the tag.

Eventually, he got it.

Iona pulled her dress over her head with her legs falling over the edge of the I-beam. Gage whipped his shirt off his shoulders and handed it to her. She took it and wrapped it around her bare skin.

“What do we do with the dress? Drop it down the elevator shaft? Leave it for the rillos to nest in?”

Gage scrunched it up in a ball and pushed the whole thing into a pocket above the knee of his pants.

“Men’s clothes are the worst,” Iona commented crossly as she did up the buttons of Gage’s shirt. “As if you have pockets there!”

“You’d rather look sexy than have pockets. What you’re really ticked off about is that you don’t look as sexy as men do with weird bulges on your legs.”

“Yes, I am ticked off about that,” she agreed. “I’m also ticked off that I have to do all this in bare feet. The floor is smelly and sticky.”

“You can get washed up on the Cannonball when we get there,” he said, standing up and testing his weight against the I-beam above him. “I’d better go first, then I can lift you up if you have a problem.”

“On Europa? The gravity here is so light, we could probably fly if we put our minds to it.”

He smiled at her before lifting himself up to the next floor.