No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Read Online Free PDF Page B

that.
    Raena changed the subject. “Jain Thallian was probably as close to a child as I’ll ever have. And really, he was more like a brother to me than a son.”
    Jain was the Thallian clone who had traveled on the Veracity , although he had been a prisoner rather than a guest. Haoun had never spoken to the boy, but—alongside Mykah and Coni—Haoun had watched Raena telling her life story to the kid. Jain had been barely more than a child, but he’d committed at least one vicious murder before Raena caught him.
    Not at all sure he wanted to know, Haoun asked, “What happened to Jain after you took him home?”
    “He died.” Anger made her voice tight.
    “You didn’t—?”
    “No, I didn’t kill him. His family put a noose around his neck and left him standing on a parapet. Jain hung himself.”
    Raena stared into the distance, seeing it again. “I thought about letting him go,” she confessed, “but I couldn’t figure out how he could survive. Thallian broke Jain—broke all his sons, for that matter—the way he’d broken me. But I got twenty years locked away from him in which to heal. I wasn’t about to subject anyone else to that kind of a sentence. Loose in the galaxy, Jain was going to become a serial killer like his father. He wasn’t old enough or smart enough to restrain himself. At the very least, if I’d let Jain go, he would have spent the rest of his life hunting me down for what I did to his family.”
    Haoun didn’t know the details of what had happened on the Thallian homeworld, other than the Thallians died and Raena did not. When they finally turned onto the street of toy shops, he was relieved to change the subject.
    *   *   *
    Jim toed out of his boots and aligned them precisely beside the door. It had been a long day, climbing and crawling inside an expensive new spaceship, replacing its barely used tesseract drive with a secondhand, refurbished drive. Although his muscles ached, Jim was satisfied with the day’s work, happily exhausted.
    He switched on the screen to keep him company as he assembled a frugal dinner. When the computer spoke to him, it had a voice similar to Raena Zacari’s, low and musical. It read out the messages his mother had sent today. She’d been easy to find, once he looked for her: staying with the family who had owned Raena when she’d been enslaved before the War. Eilif didn’t seem to be a slave. Instead, she worked for a charity that bought human children out of slavery and found them homes. Eilif seemed content there. Jim was glad.
    “News from Drusingyi,” the computer said. Jim dropped the knife in his hand. Luckily, it missed his stockinged foot when it landed point-down in the floor.
    “The secondary dome has been cleared of water. Emergency power is restored.”
    Trembling, Jim played the message again. Once more the computer said, “The secondary dome has been cleared of water. Emergency power is restored.”
    Nothing more.
    “Show me.” Jim’s voice squeaked up into a higher register. He swallowed hard and repeated himself.
    One of the family’s surveillance cameras came online. This one looked from the barracks where the crew of the Arbiter had lived under the sea. The camera pointed toward the blackened hulk of the castle. Its breached dome yawned open. On the extreme edge of the field of view, an unhealthy greenish glow lit the hospital dome. Inside that dome, the family’s cloning lab once stood.
    Jim typed in the command to swivel the camera as far as it would go. From what he could see, the cloning lab’s dome did seem to have been repaired. Shadows moved inside it, impossible to identify.
    “Maybe it’s nothing,” he whispered. Maybe they were thrill seekers, gawkers who’d come to gloat over the relics of the Thallians. Maybe they were looters or salvagers. But if they wanted to steal his family’s belongings, wouldn’t they concentrate on the castle? Why would the cloning facility interest them at all? Why would