him. She kept her inner self guarded; it was her way, and experience had taught her that there was little point in trying to change it. Somehow, whenever she let her defences down, she always chose the wrong person; yet if she kept them up, she drove people away from her.
She had fallen into two relationships since she had lived in the Fold, both fulfilling at the time but ultimately proving empty. One man she was with for three years before realising that she stayed with him to alleviate the guilt she felt over the death of Tane, who had followed her into the Imperial Keep out of love and had died there. The other lasted six months before he revealed a terrible temper, made worse by the fact that he could not physically overpower her since she was an apprentice of the Red Order. She did not see the rage building until it burst out. He hit her once. She used her kana to crush the bones in his hand. Unfortunately, despite his other failings, he had been a skilled bomb engineer and a great asset to the Libera Dramach, but Kaiku’s actions had put paid to that. She felt more sorry about causing trouble for Zaelis’s organisation than about maiming him.
But there was one other, who had got under her skin a long while ago and would not be dislodged, persistent as the whispers from her father’s Mask that sometimes woke her in the night with their insidious temptations.
‘I miss Asara,’ she said absently, her eyes unfocused.
‘Asara tu Amarecha?’ Saran said.
Kaiku’s head snapped around to meet his gaze. ‘You know her?’
‘I have met her,’ he said. ‘Not that she was going by that name, but then, she never did keep to one identity for too long.’
‘Where? Where did you meet her?’
Saran raised a sculpted eyebrow at the urgency in Kaiku’s voice. ‘Actually, it was in the very port that we are docking at tomorrow. Several years ago, now. She did not know me, but I knew her. She was wearing a different face, but I had intelligence of her arrival.’ He smiled to himself, enjoying Kaiku’s attention. ‘I made contact with her. We are both, after all, on the same side.’
‘Asara is on nobody’s side,’ Kaiku said.
‘She chooses her allegiances to suit herself,’ Saran said, then turned away from her and into the wind, flicking his hair away from his face with a flourish. ‘But you of all people should know that she is helping the Red Order and the Libera Dramach.’
‘She was,’ said Kaiku. ‘I have not seen her since Lucia was—’ She stopped herself, then remembered that Saran already knew. Brushing her fringe back in an unconscious imitation of him, she continued more carefully. ‘Since Lucia came to the Fold.’
‘She spoke highly of you,’ Saran told her, pacing slowly about the foredeck. He stood too rigid, too straight, and Kaiku felt that his movements and speech were pretentiously theatrical. He annoyed her when he became like this. Suddenly, now that he knew he had information she wanted, he was showing off, making the most of his advantage. She should have deflated him and feigned disinterest, but it was too late. Quraal were legendarily arrogant, and Saran was no exception. Like many people who were naturally beautiful, he did not feel he had to cultivate the finer points of his personality since women would fall at his feet anyway. What irked Kaiku more than anything was that she knew that, and yet she still kept coming back to him.
Saran wanted her to ask what Asara had said about her, but she would not give him the satisfaction this time.
He leaned on his elbows against the bow railing, the moon at his shoulder, and studied her with his dark eyes. ‘What were you two to each other?’ he asked eventually.
Kaiku almost felt that she did not want to tell him; but tonight she felt reflective, and it did her good to talk.
‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I never knew who she was, or what she was. I knew she could . . . shift her form somehow. I knew she had watched over me for a long time, waiting for my kana to show itself. She could be cruel, or kind. I think maybe she was lonely, but too obsessed with being independent to admit it to herself.’
‘Were you friends?’
Kaiku frowned. ‘We were . . . more than friends, and less than friends. I do not know