Free Honour's Knight by Rachel Bach Page B

properly for the first time.
    To my surprise, he was worth looking at. Even buried under the coats, his body looked tall and graceful. His pale skin was reddened from the cold, but the blush only accented his sleek black hair and blue eyes. If I hadn’t caught him trying to kick me off the ship yesterday, I would have called him handsome.
    I was so busy studying the cook, I didn’t realize the bunker was already occupied until I heard the scrape of boots on the cement floor. A man and a woman were standing on the other side of the bunker from the door where we had come in. They were bundled in the same heavy coats as the captain and the cook, and they held themselves like soldiers. Between them was a smaller figure so wrapped up in winter gear I couldn’t see anything until she raised her head. When she did, though, I wished to the king she’d left it down, because the girl standing between the strangers like a shy child between her parents was Ren.
    Even covered in coats, there was no doubting it was her, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. None of this made sense, anyway. Why not throw in another Ren? This made three of them now: Caldswell’s Ren, the barefoot Ren who’d been dragging me around, and the new girl.
    No one else in the room seemed to notice my Ren. Or me, for that matter. They could clearly see one another, though, and none of them looked weirded out in the slightest by the two identical girls. In fact, the pair who’d been waiting in the bunker seemed more intimidated by Caldswell than his daughter. They snapped to attention the moment the captain looked up, and the woman, a tall, wiry lady with straight dark hair, gave him a sharp salute.
    “Commander Caldswell,” she said crisply. “Well met, sir.”
    “I’d hardly call such business well met, Eye Natalia,” Caldswell said. “Do you have what we discussed?”
    I winced. The captain’s voice was calm, but I could tell from his posture that he was pissed. The lady, Eye Natalia, must have picked that up too, because she cleared her throat and glanced nervously at her partner, a huge brick of a man in a black suit very similar to the ones the cook always wore. “We do,” she said. “We can begin at any time.”
    Caldswell hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his coat and turned his glare to the cook, who’d stayed perfectly still through the whole exchange. “Do it.”
    Eye Natalia saluted again, but it was her partner who acted. The huge man let go of his Ren’s hand and turned away, walking through the shadows to a little door at the bunker’s far end. He returned a minute later, dragging something behind him.
    The light from the bunker’s single lamp was so bad, I couldn’t actually make out what it was at first. The cook recognized it, though. His whole body had gone stiff the moment the thing came through the door. But as the big man dragged it closer, I stopped worrying about the cook. As they entered the light, I could see that the limp weight Eye Natalia’s partner was dragging across the icy cement was a woman. A petite, young-looking woman with wavy, flyaway brown hair, most of which was drenched in blood from a head wound.
    My stomach began to ice over, but I forced myself to keep watching as the man stopped in front of Caldswell and yanked the bloody woman to her knees. This close, I could now see that the bloody rags she was wearing were actually the shredded remains of a suit of Paradoxian underarmor. The woman had clearly put up a fight before being brought here, because her knuckles were bloody, too. That was to be expected, though, because when the big man yanked the woman’s head up, it was my face that appeared, teeth bared in fury and vengeance despite the blood that trickled from my split temple.
    By this point, my brain was moving at a snail’s pace. I could see the whole scene frozen like a picture in front of me, Natalia standing hand in hand with her Ren across the room, watching