41:03:33 GrS

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The inn had five spacious hot springs and at least double that number of smaller ones for couples and small families. Lyra had spent many years coming there with her family and she knew all of the best ones. She led them though the fading fog, up stone steps and along cobbled paths until they reached a small pool, set in an isolated stand of nava trees and old hardwoods.

The bath was irregular, lined in volcanic rock that had been worn smooth by generations of visitors. Divesting themselves of their robes, they slipped into the pungent water. Rei turned up her nose at the sulfurous odor, but Lyra assured her she wouldn't notice it after a few minutes.

They relaxed on the stone seats beneath the water and leaned against comfortable divots that had been carved into the rocks and gradually softened over the centuries. Tufts of thick bamboo stalks ran most of the way around the two-meter pool, forming a natural privacy screen. Water heated by geothermal vents deep underground flowed from a nearby spring with bubbles and occasional spitting hisses, then gurgled down a rocky, carved channel, making pleasant splashing sounds as it poured into the basin.

"Mmm," said Lyra as the water soothed the tightness in her neck and spine. Sera came next, and Lyra's eyes were drawn to her toned body— sculpted shoulders and arms, voluptuous breasts that men lusted for and women envied, round hips dipping to muscular thighs. Lyra couldn't help feeling a little... inadequate. And jealous.

"Like what you see?" Sera teased as she slid beneath the water.

"Keep dreaming, Rendix."

Sera chuckled. Her pale skin was full of freckles, and nearly as many scars. Most looked years old, but there were dozens of new marks where Ariel had laser-sutured the multitude of lacerations Rawl had inflicted.

Reiko followed, lithe and somewhat more angular. Her cheeks blushed under Lyra's gaze.

"Sorry," Lyra mumbled. "On Inusagi, bathing with your friends is as common as breathing."

"Is leering common too?" Sera poked.

Lyra scowled at her. "I'm not leering, Rendix, I'm... appreciating. You're both beautiful."

"Right back at you," Reiko smiled as she settled beside Sera and took her hand.

She waved. "Allegra was the beauty. My father's artist friends loved it when she modeled for them."

"What about you?"

"I was awkward and... not graceful, not like my sister. To be honest, I've always been pretty self-conscious about the way I look. My chin's all wrong, my eyes are too far apart, my nose—"

"Hey, stop selling yourself short, Nimor," Sera interrupted her.

"What?"

"People notice you, men and women both. I've watched them and I can tell. They don't think you're awkward, or graceless."

"I—" Lyra blurted, even more self-conscious at the unexpected conversational turn.

Reiko seconded with an eager nod. "You're very beautiful, Lyra. We both think so."

"Especially your ass. The way it swishes when you walk?" Sera whistled and made a squeezing motion with her hand. "You've got a great ass, Nimor."

Lyra's face reddened as she hurled a hard scowl at Rendix. "What are you—!"

Sera and Rei shared a laugh. "Don't worry, Nimor, you're hardly my type." She tousled Reiko's hair to drive the point home, then waved her hand around. "This is a nice place. Did you grow up here?"

"No, but we visited a couple of times a year. Allegra and I used to help at the inn, cleaning rooms, attending the baths, that kind of thing. The months before I went to the academy I practically lived here. It was a good way to retreat from the troubles with my aunt, but looking back on it, I was running away from myself, too." To avoid falling into melancholy, she quickly followed with a question of her own. "How's your hand?"

"Coming along." She wiggled it for emphasis. "Doc said he's gonna try regrowing my fingers later today, but he's been looking pretty worn down. I'm in no rush."

"Are you... feeling okay?"

Sera didn't open her eyes, but she stiffened just a little. "It's not an experience I'd want to repeat."

There was a little splash as Reiko adjusted her position. "Sera-sha, why did that man call you Brasheer?"

Sera opened her eyes at the question and stared at the towering stalks of rainbow bamboo gently oscillating in the breeze. Her mouth twitched like she wanted to say something but couldn't figure out how. Finally, she said in a quiet, even tone, "That was my family's name back on Corellia."

Maybe she was expecting a bigger reaction out of Reiko, but the engineer simply said, "Why didn't you keep it?"

Sera glanced at Lyra, then looked into Rei's brown eyes. "Sera Brasheer was a scared, weak child with no hope and no future. She was a stim-addled street roach in a nest of street roaches, stealing to survive and praying the Amberdyre's enforcers wouldn't beat us bloody each day for failing to make quota." Rei squeezed her hand harder. "Are you sure you want to hear this, my love?"

Hudson paused, but only for an instant. "I know you're a private person, Sera-sha, and I've kept my questions to myself all these years. But that doesn't mean I don't want to know everything. Even if it's bad."

"Some of it's worse than bad," Sera warned, not quite snapping, but coming close.

Reiko persisted. "Was that man part of your past?"

Sera sat up and drew in a slow breath. "One of the worst parts. His name was Zorath Rawl. He was an enforcer for the Amberdyre Syndicate in Kor Runal, the industrial slum where I grew up. Rawl was a low-level thug who rose through the organization by being more brutal and cunning than the rest. He was just the kind the syndicate's leaders liked to use to keep their street roaches in line. We did snatch-and-grabs, pickpocketing, things like that. Some of the older ones ran cons. They were called 'sharps'. They'd cozy up to tourists, visitors there on business, anybody they could take for a few credits. The sharps had it pretty good since they got to hang out in the bars and salons looking for marks.

"Then there were the 'dolls'. They were the good-looking ones, girls and boys. The dolls got... loaned to powerful people so they could use us... however they felt like."

"Us?" Rei gasped quietly and started to tremble, but she put her other hand over Sera's and after a second she nodded for her to continue.

Lyra started to get up, but Sera stopped her. "It's alright, Nimor, you can stay. Unless you don't want to hear it."

She had to admit to her own morbid curiosity, having picked up particles of Rendix's past here and there in the months since they'd been living side-by-side on Allegra's Heart. She sat with a quiet, "Okay."

"I was tall for my age, thin, like all of us were, underfed, but even with the stims they used to juice us up before handing us off, I had spirit. 'Spark', Rawl called it, and he hated it. He felt like it was his personal mission to break every one of us down. He couldn't beat us or cut us because the Amberdyre's patrons were powerful people; corporate leaders, politicians, even some Imperials. They didn't like their dolls to be bruised unless they were doing the bruising." She stopped for a minute and gave Reiko a soft look, almost like she was imploring her lover to stop her. But the engineer just stared, looking vulnerable and resolute.

Sera smiled, a hollow expression bereft of any mirth. "He found other ways. Stun batons, neuro guns that made it feel like you were burning. And he raped us. All of us."

Lyra sat rock-still, trying in vain to imagine the depraved depths of someone who would misuse children so brutally. Rei covered her mouth and squeezed Sera's hand while tears fell down her cheeks.

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"He was as rough and merciless as he thought he could be without ruining us. Some of the patrons were rough too." She made a harsh sound. "Let me tell you, people who have a powerless child to play with can be... disgusting. We were just their playthings, though. I knew it wasn't personal to them, but it was different with Rawl. He felt like he'd failed if he couldn't break us."

She shook her head and moved her hand through the water, making gentle ripples. "He succeeded a lot. Most of the dolls dealt with it by hitting the stims even harder. As expensive as they were on the streets, somehow there was always plenty of juice around. For some, even that wasn't enough. They'd try running, but Rawl loved that. He'd hunt them down, drag them back, and gut them. It was a warning to the rest of us, and it mostly worked." For a second Sera's face froze, her eyes glinting with some remembered horror.

"A few found other ways to end it all and we'd find them hanging from a cord, or with a bloody knife they'd used to cut their own throats, or broken on the street where they'd jumped from a rooftop. For me though, all the stims in the city didn't make a difference. They started dealing me around to the patrons who liked a little spirit in their dolls. That's when Rawl really decided to go all-out. It was going to be either him or me. So when I was sixteen he —" her voice shook then, and Sera had to take a few seconds to compose herself. "I guess he was so upset at not being able to break me that he threw the rules to the wind. He tied me to a wall, then he..." She sucked in a sharp breath. "He tortured and raped me for two days."

"Oh, Goddess, Sera —!" Reiko uttered a strangled sob, her pretty face tortured with the horror of what she was hearing.

Sera pulled her close and held onto her with desperate strength. Not a sound escaped her lips, but she heaved labored breaths through her nostrils. Her face was a stiff mask of discipline, awash with tears. They stayed like that for a while until Sera mastered her emotions and gently untangled herself, whispering encouragingly and wiping Reiko's face. When she'd calmed her, she held her hands again.

She turned her one eye on Lyra, whose stricken look was mingled with fury. "You okay, Imp?"

"Sure," Lyra managed through clenched teeth and tears, "I just wish I could bring that bastard back so I could kill him over and over, very slowly."

Sera grimaced and rubbed at her wet cheeks. "Careful what you wish for. I killed him once, I thought." She leaned back, patting Reiko's hand. "Sometimes I'd daydream about escaping from the syndicate, but after that, I knew I had to get away. When the bosses found out what he'd done, they punished him. I don't know what they did, but I heard it put him in the hospital for three weeks. It was enough time for me to make a plan.

"One thing about dolls; getting shopped around to the local movers and shakers meant we heard a lot. I found out the syndicate was going to boost a shipment of high-end security droids so they could reprogram them into assassins. They'd stockpiled some military-grade explosives to use in the ambush. I got the ordnance company's senior manager to give me the code to the storage warehouse —" She barked a dark chuckle. "Don't ask me what I had to do to get it."

Sera took a deep breath before she went on. "Anyway, I helped myself to an imploder mine. When Rawl came back, I put it in a supply closet outside his apartment on a timer delay. That night I was assigned to the local precinct ward chief. He liked me, almost as much as he liked stims. He used to make me inject him while he was in the middle of playing with me. Said it got him 'extra frisky'."

She made a disgusted face. "I pretended to juice myself, then I shot him up with both doses. He was a degenerate pig, but he wasn't stupid. He tried calling his bodyguard droid but I got my hands on this tacky crystal award he'd been given for civic service or some-such. I beat him with it, then smothered him with a pillow until he wasn't breathing anymore. I told his droid he'd fallen asleep, which was the truth half the time, and I left with forty-seven credits I found in his pants pocket.

"I heard the emergency alarms from the building collapse. I almost went back to see what happened, but instead I grabbed a cab to the spaceport and gave a bored mechanic the rest of the credits so she could buy some deathsticks. When she left, I crawled through the conveyor she was repairing and snuck into the hold of the first ship I saw.

It was a bulk freighter, the Fortuna Rendix. The hunger and stim withdrawal were so bad I almost threw myself out an airlock, but six days later I was on Excarga. I fell in with the local underworld there. It was better than where I'd been, but not by much. I wasn't anybody's doll, though, so there was that."

Sera's lips curled into a thin smile. "I spent over a year on that rock, stealing, running cons. One day I saw this tall woman shopping in the market." Her eyes lit up with the memory. "She had long hair in these thick braids, and the most beautiful black skin I'd ever seen." She gave Reiko a sheepish look. "I fell in love a little right then. Didn't stop me trying to lift her credit chip, though." Sera's smile was genuine this time. "When she asked me my name, I told her it was Sera Rendix. The rest you know."

"Oh, Sera-sha!" Reiko sobbed anew and threw her arms around the commando's shoulders. Sera soothed her, stroking her back until she found her composure.

Lyra sniffed, swallowed past the asteroid lodged in her throat, and wiped her eyes. She put a hand on Sera's arm. "I'm... well, it means a lot that you shared that with me, Rendix."

Sera squeezed Lyra's hand and smiled at her with more affection and gratitude than she'd ever seen from the tough warrior. "On the Ammon Night I had an escape plan, but you saw how that was going. You saved me on that ship. Both of you did. You deserved to know."

"You're a pain in the ass, Sera Rendix, but you're the strongest, bravest woman I've ever met, except maybe for my mother." Lyra smiled at both of them and got up. "I expect you two want some time to yourselves." She nodded toward an intercom at the edge of the pool. "Stay as long as you like; no one will come here unless you call. I'm going to find Oktos."

"He —" Sera started as Lyra stepped out of the pool.

"It's your story to tell, Rebel, not mine. If he hears about it, it won't be from me." She toweled off, put on her robe, and aimed a look at Reiko. "Take care of her."

"I will," assured Rei, wearing a serious, tearful grin.

They watched Lyra walk down the path, leaving them alone in the warm, gurgling pool. Surai's morning light refracted through the rising mists and fell on Rei's sad, disappointed face. "Why didn't you tell me what happened on Enarc?"

"I... I thought I'd buried that Sera a decade ago. I figured I'd never see that monster Rawl again, so I decided just to keep quiet about the whole thing. But when I saw him on Enarc it took me right back to that scared, powerless, stim slave that I despised." She stared hard at the swirling, steaming water. "I was so ashamed of what I'd been. I didn't want you to know that Sera, that's all."

"Ashamed, why? Were you afraid I'd think less of you?"

"It's not that —"

"You told Lyra and Taz."

Sera picked up the accusatory edge in her tone. "I told them a very small part of it because they knew something serious had happened. Lyra saw Sykes at the cargo transfer and Doc thought we might have trouble with them again." She uttered a sardonic noise. "Guess he was right."

"Did Rawl — On the Ammon Night, did he —?" She tried, but Reiko couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.

Sera's reply was a succinct "Yes." She thought Rei might break down again, but she just looked at her with those huge brown eyes full of love and empathy. It made Sera smile in spite of the heavy pall hanging over them. "Do you remember the first time we met?"

"Of course, Sera-sha."

"You were sitting on that bench by the sparring field, looking as out of place as a purramouse at a rastfalk convention."

Reiko scrunched up her face. "I remember."

"I never told you why I was there, on the side of the field at Arclight instead of sparring with the others. Truth was, I'd just come from the Command Senior Trooper's office where he told me I'd failed my Basic Military Ops evaluation. For the second time."

Rei looked surprised. "Sera-sha, I thought you were the top recruit in your cohort!"

"Remember what I said after you told me you were starting BMO?"

"You asked me how anyone as small as I am was going to pass." She looked down at her hands clasping Sera's. "I thought you were bullying me, but honestly, I didn't know how I was going to pass either. My father dying in an Imperial prison made me so mad I ran off and joined up, but right about then I figured out that I'd made a terrible mistake."

Sera got a faraway look. "There you were, sitting on that bench looking lost, but so determined. And there I was, scared because I hadn't made a single friend in nearly two months, and even more scared because I knew that if I washed out I'd have nothing to return to but the streets. The thought that there might be another Zorath Rawl out there was..." She couldn't quite stifle her shudder.

"Anyway, I decided right then that I was going to make sure you passed BMO. And the only way to do that was to work hard enough to pass it myself." She lit up with a smile. "I made my first real friend that day, and I graduated at the top of my cohort because of you, Rei-sha. You pushed me to be better than I thought I could be myself."

"Sera-sha."

"Every day, every second I'm with you, I'm better because of it, Reiko Hudson." She traced the soft line of Rei's jaw with her finger, then drew the smaller woman into a long, sensuous kiss. They parted, breathless, and Sera kissed Rei's palm, then slowly guided it down her body. Her face was full of passion and barely restrained desire as she moved Reiko's hand lower.

"Sera-sha, after what happened, are you sure you... want to be touched?"

She nibbled Reiko's soft neck and earlobe, drawing a rasping gasp from her. "Touch me, Rei-sha. Let me feel pleasure from the woman I love more than anything in the universe." Sera's mouth smothered Rei's and the sound of water splashing in the pool did little to mask the lovers' fevered cries and moans.

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Reiko reclined with her head on Sera's shoulder after their ecstatic intimacies, feeling giddy and sated. "You're unbelievably tough and gorgeous and strong, Sera-sha, and I love the way it feels knowing you're always there to protect me. But you don't have to be strong all the time. It's okay if you need to lean on me, and it's okay to tell me things, even uncomfortable, terrible things. I can be strong for you too."

"I know you can, my love. Nimor wanted me to tell you. She said you'd be strong enough to handle it, and I knew you would be. I just didn't think that I'd be strong enough to tell you."

"Promise me, then. Promise me you won't keep things from me just to protect me. You don't need to do that ever again."

"Alright, my love, I promise."

"Good," Rei said. After a moment she added, "When we get back to Allegra I want to fly her to Filve. I want to take you to meet my mom and my sisters. And then," she sat up and cradled Sera's face. "I want you to make me your wife."

Sera's single eye got wide before it filled with tears and her freckled face glowed in the morning light. The tough commando's voice was husky with barely restrained emotion. "Oh, my love, a million times yes!"

Their embrace led to another pleasurable interval that consumed them both.