Kieran (Tales of the Shareem) Read Free Page A

get away from him, but this man, this Shareem, wasn’t a slaver. He didn’t have the look. Slavers had cold, dead eyes—didn’t matter what species; the eyes were always the same.
    Not all slavers she’d seen mistreated the slaves they sold, and some even took care of them, but they didn’t view slaves as human—or whatever alien they happened to trade. Slaves were commodities. Some slavers talked to their slaves, befriended them, counseled them, but when it was time to sell, anything personal was over. Felice had seen that often enough in the past four years.
    This man’s eyes took in a lot and gave back. He wasn’t looking upon Felice as a commodity, although he didn’t regard her with open-armed friendliness either.
    He glanced behind them, probably looking for patrollers, before he pulled Felice into a narrow alley that had no covering. Heat blasted down on them, which she could feel even through the robes. How the hell did people live in this place? It was so hot, her breath burned in her lungs.
    No canopy, however, meant that no one lingered here. The man pulled her through the empty alley and around yet another corner to a passage whose pavement was covered with slick sand. A rusting metal door was recessed into the wall halfway along, two stone steps leading up to it, a card slot waiting patiently beside it.
    The man slid a card into the slot, and the door rolled open with groaning protest, as though it regularly stuck inside its channel. The man pushed Felice into the dim room beyond, then followed her after checking the street.
    The door slammed with another grating screech, cutting off the heat.
    The apartment Felice found herself in was warm and close, but the contrast to the blast furnace outside made it seem like paradise. Funny how paradise varied with climate, the back of her mind mused—those in the cold thought of sunny meadows; those who lived in heat dreamed of deep shade and cool water.
    “Off,” the man said.
    “What?” The robe muffled her response.
    A large hand closed over the robes and ripped them away, leaving Felice standing in her torn and filthy tunic, exposed and vulnerable. She could fight him if she needed to—she knew that—but she was so exhausted she hoped she wouldn’t have to.
    The man looked her up and down. “What are you?” he demanded.
    Felice folded her arms, the universal body language for stay away . “I should be asking you that. You dragged me here. What do you want?”
    The man said nothing for a long time, pinning her with his blue gaze, which was starting to make her hot all over. Forget the temperature outside. It’s scalding in here.
    “What do I want?” he repeated as though thinking hard about it. “Somewhere I can live where patrollers don’t follow me around. Friends to laugh with. A lady to do. A cold drink. What do you want?”
    Felice stared back at him, trying to decipher the answer, which wasn’t an answer. She cleared her throat. “Tell you what. How about I throw out a question, and we each answer it. Then we go on to the next question.”
    The man shrugged, which moved his muscles in a nice way. “All right.”
    He obviously wasn’t going to say anything more, so Felice asked, “What’s your name?”
    The man considered. “That’s a good question. Good place to start.”
    “You answer first,” Felice said quickly.
    His didn’t blink. “Kieran. You?”
    “Felice.”
    Damn. She hadn’t meant to blurt out her real name, but she somehow felt compelled to honesty around him.
    Didn’t matter, because he didn’t react. No recognition of the name. That meant no bulletins had gone out about Felice Henderson being missing, no offers of reward for her return. Yet. When her absence was discovered, the crew chief would waste no time trying to get her back.
    “Next question,” Kieran said. “I’m from Bor Narga. You?”
    “Earth.”
    Kieran’s expression turned amazed. “Seriously? Old Earth?”
    “Yeah, well, I haven’t been