Hijacked by Lolita Lopez

Chapter Twelve

“Are you fucking him?” Sara asked as soon as they were ensconced in the privacy of her office.

Camila spluttered. “What?”

Sara pinned her in place with a look. “Are. You. Fucking. Him.”

“A little,” Camila replied, avoiding her sister’s intense stare.

Sara snorted. “That’s like being a little pregnant, Cammy. You either are or you are not.”

“We are,” she admitted. “Having sex,” she hastily clarified. “Not the other one.”

Sara made a face. “Nebula’s tits, Cammy! You have an implant, right?”

Camila nodded. “No need to worry on that account. After helping deliver Gretta’s baby, I am not in any hurry to put myself through that.”

Sara reacted with shock. “You helped deliver a baby?”

Camila bristled. “What? Is that so hard to believe?”

“Uh, yeah, actually, it is. When Father took us on that stupid trip to the mountains, you threw up for an entire day and night after he showed us how to gut that fish Willa caught!”

“I puked, like, four times total!” Camila protested. “And it was gross. The eyes and the goo inside it.” She gagged as the memory of the sounds the knife made stampeded through her brain.

“Childbirth is gross,” Sara replied. “And there’s a lot more goo.”

“It’s different,” Camila insisted. “It was...special. Touching.” She shook her head as she tried to find the right words. “It was incredible.” She held out her hands. “Catching that baby? Being the first person in the whole universe to touch and hold her? That is an experience I will never forget.”

Sara studied her intently. “You’ve changed.”

“For the better, I hope,” Camila said.

“You’ve always been the best of us three sisters,” Sara replied. “You’ve always been the sweetest, the kindest, the friendliest of us.”

“But?” she asked, knowing there was always a “but” with a statement like that.

“But you were also selfish, silly and decadent,” Sara said, not unkindly.

“Oh, I’m still all those things,” Camila assured her big sister. “And spoiled. You can’t forget that one.”

“How could I? The evidence of that is parked on my airfield.” Sara frowned. “A luxury yacht, Cammy? Really? For one person?”

She shrugged. “Father gave it to me for my birthday. What was I going to do? Ask him for a gift receipt so I could return it?”

Sara rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s going to be put to good use now.”

“You’re going to scrap it,” Camila stated, certain that was the route her sister would take.

“Yes, we can’t sell it in one piece. We’ll part it out, remove any serial numbers and tags.”

“You’ll have to spread out the sales over years,” she warned. “If you part it out too closely together, someone is bound to notice and put together the clues.”

“I’m quite aware,” Sara replied dryly.

“Sorry,” Camila muttered.

The SeeSpeak holstered at Sara’s hip chirped. She lifted the thin, rectangular communication device to face level and began to talk to one of her underlings. While Sara listened to the report on the medical condition of the civilian women and children, Camila wandered around her sister’s surprisingly spacious office. Floor to ceiling windows overlooked the airfield. Most of the room was filled with electronics and highly sophisticated tech. How Sara was paying for all of this mystified her.

Noticing the shelves at the back of the office, she headed closer for a better look at what her sister had collected. As she neared the shelves, she jerked to a stop. Her gaze swept the shelves, right to left, up and down. Everywhere she looked, there were gifts she had sent Sara. All of them. Every little trinket and souvenir. Every photo. Every holographic postcard. Every handwritten note. They were all there, neatly arranged and visible to every visitor.

“Are you all right?” Sara asked gently from behind her desk.

Camila swallowed hard and turned to face her sister. Her eyes stung as she said, “You kept them.”

Sara frowned. “Your gifts? Of course, I did. I know how difficult it was for you to get them to me through all those dead drops and cut-outs.”

“I thought...”

“What?” Sara walked around the desk and came closer. “You thought I threw them away?”

“You never wrote back or sent anything. I just assumed—”

“That I didn’t care?”

Camila shrugged. “Yes.”

“If you thought I didn’t care, why did you keep sending gifts?”

“Because I love you,” she answered simply. “And I wanted you to know that no matter what was going on, no matter how hard things were for you, that I loved you and missed you.”

“Cammy,” Sara said, blinking rapidly. “I’ve been such a miserable shit of a sister! I should have made more of an effort to send things to you.”

“It’s okay,” Camila assured her. “I know you were busy.”

“So were you!”

“It’s different for me. I wasn’t trying to save the galaxy.”

“You are now,” Sara remarked.

Camila inhaled sharply. “I’m not!”

“Then why did you bring those cyborgs here? Those kids and their moms?”

“What happened to them was cruel and wrong.”

“And what do you think is going to happen to you when the emperor realizes you’ve gone rogue like your big sister?” Sara stared expectantly. “You know what will happen if you go back.”

Camila nodded reluctantly. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

“You better think about it,” Sara warned. “Think hard. You’re going to have to make some tough decisions, Cammy. No matter what you choose, you can never go back to the life you had before those cyborgs hijacked your ship. Even if you manage to go home and convince the emperor that you were an innocent victim, you’ll never be able to forget what you know. You’re changed now. Forever.”

"I know.” Camila sighed, completely unprepared to go there mentally. Changing the subject, she asked, “Can you help these cyborgs? The civilian family members?”

“It will be easier to remove the brand from the faces of the civilians,” Sara began. “One of my contacts in a different freedom group picked up four pods of survivors from the prison ship. They’ve been able to remove the markings from the civilians, but the cyborg brands have proven impossible to change.”

“So far,” Camila remarked hopefully.

“If we can get the civilians wiped clean, it will be easy enough to provide them with the new IDs, backstories and money to start over in sectors beyond the emperor’s control.”

“What about their cyborg relatives? Is there a way to reunite them?”

Sara exhaled a noisy breath. “I mean—anything is possible.” She considered the problem for a moment. “We could try to create a matrix barcode, maybe hide it in our breakthrough transmissions. We could run it on a frequency only the cyborgs can see. Maybe send them to a closed, encrypted, brick walled digital address that would allow them to input their details. We could compare those to a database we maintain and attempt to reunite that way.” Sara scrunched up her nose. “We would have to run the reunification through various networks, planets, systems. Make sure no one can track it back to us.”

“Do you think the emperor’s goons will be able to track my ship here to you?” Camila didn’t want to imagine that outcome, but it had to be asked.

Sara shook her head. “The cyborgs wiped your ship’s digital fingerprint. Our defense net is impenetrable. Even if your ship was able to transmit a beacon, it wouldn’t get any farther than the mesosphere.”

“All of this tech you have is very expensive, Sara.” Camila narrowed her eyes at her sister. “How are you paying for all of this?”

“Sorry, love, but until you take a blood oath, those secrets are mine.”

Camila recoiled. “Keep your secrets. I’m not letting you anywhere near my fingers with anything sharp.”

Sara huffed dramatically. “Are you still whining about the ear-piercing thing?”

“Thing? Sara! My earlobes were so infected they wanted to amputate my ears!”

“They did not! That was just Mother exaggerating so Willa wouldn’t get any silly ideas.”

“I still have scars!” Camila pointed to the marks on her earlobes.

“Which are easily covered with earrings,” Sara retorted.

Camila’s frowned at her sister. “That’s not the point.”

“What are we even arguing about?” Sara asked, throwing her hands in the air.

“You wanting to stab me before you tell me how you’re paying for all this,” Camila reminded her.

“Oh. Right. That.” Sara shook her head. “Not yet, Cammy. Not until you decide what you’re going to do.”

“Fair enough,” she replied. Keeping a secret of that magnitude would be difficult so maybe not knowing was safer. “So, what can I do to help?”

Sara didn’t have to think very hard to find a project that needed attention. “You still like organizing things?’

“Is the sky blue?”

“Not here actually,” Sara replied. “More of a lavender.”

Camila rolled her eyes. “Yes, I still get ridiculously excited about organizing things, especially if there are bins and baskets and labels at hand.”

“Well, it’s definitely your lucky day because we have pallets of supplies that arrived almost a week ago. They’re filling that hangar over there.” Sara pointed across the airfield. “Food, medical, clothing, tech, weapons,” she listed off the contents of the pallets. “I need them inventoried, sorted and organized.”

Camila considered the project. “Fine, but I’m in charge. I don’t want anyone telling me how to do my job.”

“Would you like me to draw you a shiny little badge to tape right here?” Sara tapped Camila’s chest.

“As a matter of fact,” Camila replied with a haughty lift of her chin.

Sara grinned. “I missed this, Cammy. You. Me. Sister stuff.”

“I missed it, too.”

“You had Willa—”

Camila shook her head. “Willa lives in her own universe. She tolerates my quick visits to her lab and library, but that’s about it.”

“She loves you,” Sara insisted.

“I know,” she agreed. “In her own way.”

“Well,” Sara embraced her, “you’re here now. Let’s make the best of whatever time we have together.”

Hugged tightly in her sister’s arms, Camila feared the choice she would soon have to make. Stay here and join her sister’s rebellion? Return home, pretend she had been an unwilling victim and live her old life? Ask Misko to take her with him, wherever he was going, because the thought of being apart from him made her stomach twist and her heart ache?

Stars, help me. I don’t know what to do.