Bree may be away healing, but she has left behind a thank you gift! For the next few weeks, Tuesdays & Thursdays will feature new posts from a serial featuring some old friends. This serial was originally posted (mostly!) on Patreon, and has been edited and finished to be posted live on our blog over the next few weeks. But for those who just want it NOW, or who hate reading on a blog and would like an epub… Well here is the epub!
Return to the world after the Beyond Series and meet the residents of Sector Three…
When Ashwin asks Six & Bren to take in an emotionally fractured Makhai soldier, there are a thousand things that could go wrong. But they are hard at work building their school and rebuilding their sector, and Sebastian is a genius who can fix anything. Anything. In return for his help, all they have to do is give him a safe place to find out if his emotional wounds can be healed.
Just one traumatized supersoldier in the middle of a school filled with former feral street kids, war refugees from exclusive brothels, and a few dozen kids who barely know what a school is.
What could go wrong?
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DISCLAIMERS: this is a serial meant for existing readers of the series. it contains full series spoilers for the Beyond Series and may not make sense if you haven’t read it.
It is also NOT erotic. This is the first part of a very very very slow burn romance between a broken Makhai soldier and an artist who escaped Sector Two after the bombings. There may also be a few other romances a brewing… consider this more like a TV show with multiple members of the cast up to hijinks, even if there are two main characters.
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Bren hadn’t lied to him. Sector Three was a mess.
Sebastian frowned as he assembled a new battery block for the truck parked behind him. Bren had only wanted to try to patch the engine up well enough to put it back into use, but Sebastian didn’t see the point when he could build a better solution.
The engine was from another time. 2028 or ‘29, most likely. This particular manufacturer’s attempt to disrupt the rising dominance of solar power during the run-up to the Energy Wars had failed dramatically, but pure biofuel engines had remained popular with a niche population. Mostly people too paranoid to trust the sun and too frugal or miserly to afford the newer, high-capacity solar batteries or the hybrid engines. As ugly as these things were, they could run on garbage if you had a working fuel convertor. That big recycling plant Six and Bren had reopened was no doubt churning out biofuel for everyone who still used it. Some people would never let go.
Still, fifty plus years was a long time to keep repairing an engine that hadn’t been all that well designed to begin with. Sebastian had created more elegant solutions as a teenager when the Base hadn’t been all that much better off than Sector Three was now. At least the tools were new, and in good repair. He’d found three partly disassembled engines and a few solar battery packs that just needed a little love. Combined with the scrap parts that lined the heavy shelves, he had more than he needed.
Sebastian had made more from less. Many times.
Of course, the lack of challenge meant the task didn’t hold his attention.
He didn’t like the feeling.
From the time he’d been old enough to understand the concept of work, he’d had more of it than he could finish in a lifetime. He’d been seven when he’d realized that the quirk in his brain that made him good at salvaging tech could be leveraged against the trainers. Every time they beat him for being insufficiently cold, he weathered the pain by solving puzzles in his head. It had been clear to him even then that he’d need to be too useful to kill if he wanted to survive as a Makhai soldier.
Sebastian was very, very useful. And the Base had used him, right up until the day he’d decided that survival wasn’t worth the price.
After that, resisting the attempts to break him had been its own sort of work.
He caught himself grinding his teeth and forced his jaw to relax. But the tension wouldn’t leave his body, and the furtive scrape of boots on cement behind him triggered an instinctive reaction.
He tried to stop. Tried with everything in him. But his body moved faster than the bruised part of him that remembered where he was. His fingers closed around battered leather, the wrench in his hand more than capable of breaking bone. He finally regained the control to release the damn thing mid-swing, flinging it off to the side where it crashed into a shelf of tools with a clatter.
“Fuck!” He saw a flash of black hair, a hint of brown skin. Then he was clutching an empty leather jacket and staring at the business end of a vicious looking knife.
“Fuck,” the woman repeated, watching him with wary brown eyes. “Are you attacking me, or just freaking out?”
Sebastian thought the tools still spilling off the shelf where he’d tossed the wrench was sufficient answer, but maybe she didn’t understand how much self-control it had taken not to eliminate a perceived enemy. “You startled me.”
“My fucking mistake.” She exhaled roughly, letting the knife drop to her side. She didn’t, however, slide it back into the sheath on her thigh. “You gonna give me my jacket?”
Watching the knife, Sebastian extended his hand. The woman plucked it out of his hand and studied him for a long time before finally sliding the knife away. Then she shrugged into the jacket, covering muscular arms covered in tattoos. “I’m River.”
One of his neighbors. The teacher. “Bast.”
“So I heard.” She strolled over to the pile of tools and retrieved his wrench. She flipped it over in her hand as she circled widely around him to get a look at the workbench. One of her eyebrows went up. “You ripped that shit engine out of my truck, huh?”
“Your truck?”
“Well, it will be.” She tossed the wrench onto the bench and hoisted herself easily up to sit on it, her booted feet swinging. “Me’n my apprentices need something better for scavenging runs, now that the roads are decent enough for driving. This will be perfect.”
Sebastian didn’t want his interest piqued. He’d resisted most of the leading comments Bren had tossed out over dinner, because he didn’t want to know about this sector or its people. And Bren hadn’t pushed him. Bren hadn’t even stuck around after showing him the shop, giving him all the space he wanted to settle in. That should have pleased him. Sebastian wanted tasks to keep his hands busy and quiet to let his mind heal, and above all else he wanted to be alone.
When you were alone, you didn’t have to feel anything. Feeling things had gotten him into this hell in the first place.
The silence lengthened. River didn’t rush to fill it any more than Bren or Six had. She didn’t stare at him with any particular expectation, either. Her boots swung and her gaze cataloged the progress he’d made with the battery pack, the sharp interest in her eyes making it clear she knew enough to be impressed with his creative solutions.
That was intriguing. Damn it. “Your apprentices?” he asked.
“Mmm,” she said, as if picking up the conversation after an awkward gap was no big deal. “I’m kind of the survival teacher, I guess. Six wants the kids to get book smarts, and that’s good. But I’m not going to let them forget their street smarts.”
It made sense. Judging by her age, she was likely an orphan of the original destruction of Sector Three. When Eden had rewarded labor strikes with bombs, they’d wiped out an entire generation of workers and caretakers, leaving behind older people broken by grief and children hardened by survival.
River had likely been a toddler at the time. Perhaps she’d survived with the help of older children. Maybe she’d been on her own. All of the reports Sebastian had read about the sector indicated it had gone bad decades ago, its leaders useless and greedy, its population making their living as scrappers and scavengers.
Scavenging must have a different cachet now, with the recycling factories up and running. Almost anything could be broken down into its component parts and used as raw materials in 3D printers. Six would have a profitable industry on her hands in a few years, if she could get them up and running efficiently.
He didn’t want to be interested in that, either. But he was. Damn it.
“Hey.” River snapped her fingers near his face. “I don’t like that look.”
Sebastian furrowed his brow in confusion. “What look?”
“You just got all melty-eyed.” She waved a hand at herself. “All of this?” She flicked her fingers at him dismissively. “Not for the likes of you. No offense, but big broody warrior men are not my type.”
It was odd, feeling the urge to laugh. He couldn’t remember the last time he had wanted to. He wasn’t sure he remembered how. It was possible he wouldn’t be able to–the Base might have burned that out of him with the ability to disavow violence. But he felt his lips twitch. “No offense taken.”
“Oh, come on. Be a little offended.” She kicked her feet again, grinning at him. “I’m fucking hot.”
Ashwin was right. These people were insane. She’d clearly been briefed on the danger he represented. They’d come within heartbeats of a fatal clash that likely would have left him bleeding and her dead, simply because she’d walked into the garage too quietly.
And she was laughing at him. Taunting him.
Picking up the wrench, he turned back to the battery. “You are, by all objective standards of beauty, incredibly attractive.”
“But I’m not your type, either, huh?”
The question slashed through him, an unexpected knife through a vulnerable crack in his armor.
Sebastian had never had a type. The Base, so limited in its thinking, had sent him a dozen domestic handlers over the years. Women, to start, because Eden’s warped concept of morality and intimacy had infected the Base early on. But when he’d shown no interest in using them to relieve whatever sexual needs they assumed he would find overwhelming, they’d quietly tried sending him a man.
It had never occurred to them that his problem wasn’t the people. It was the situation. He had no intention of sharing something as potentially compromising as sexual intimacy with someone whose job it was to manage him and report on him to the Base. Many of his fellow Makhai soldiers had solved that quandary by weaponizing sex to subvert the loyalties of their handlers.
The thought had always turned his stomach.
Then they’d sent him Marissa. Sweet, terrified Marissa. The perfect trap. Half his age and facing a far worse situation if she didn’t succeed in seducing him. Some Base psychologist had no doubt thought themselves tremendously clever when they’d found the perfect levers to pull, using the compassion and protectiveness they viewed as flaws against him.
It had worked. Her fear had sparked his compassion. Her vulnerability had triggered his protectiveness. But he hadn’t been her type, either. She felt no desire for men, and the cruelty of the Base sending her to him as a sexual outlet had prompted his first quiet rebellion.
Sebastian had taught her how to lie to them.
“Hey.” River’s voice was gentle. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to kick a sore spot.”
Sebastian glared at the battery and swallowed hard. “You didn’t.”
“If you say so.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her feet resume their swinging. “We’ve all got them, you know. That’s all Sector Three is. Scrappy street kids, snarls, and bruises. You think you’re the first person who’s tried to bash my head in because I startled them?” She snorted. “You think I’ve never tried to bash someone’s head in because they startled me?”
He finally looked up, and even trying to control his expression he knew he was glaring. “Yes, but you’re all of, what? Five feet tall? I’m a genetically modified soldier with training in assassination. I don’t get to be jumpy and I don’t get to make mistakes.”
“Fuck you, I’m five foot four.” She kicked one leg up, showing off motorcycle boots with a thick heel. “Five foot six in these. And I was killing men your size when I was still five feet tall, so get over yourself. Bren’s a scary sniper, Laurel can literally kill you with math, and if Six gets pissed she can summon a whole horde of O’Kanes to come beat you into dust, and those fuckers play for keeps.”
Insane didn’t cover it. These people had an active death wish.
Shaking his head, Sebastian turned his attention back to the battery pack. It was discomfiting, being so…unfeared. Especially by people who knew what he was. River didn’t discount the danger he represented. She just…didn’t care.
It was uncomfortable. It was upsettingly irrational.
But a tiny, illogical part of him…didn’t hate it.
Damn it.