[LEGACY VERSION] The Enemy of Time (Book 2 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 13 - Damon

Damon fidgeted in the fancy, high-collared jacket, the material slick and foreign against his skin, the cut too tight. Elise and Milla Radego surveyed him. They'd crammed into his quarters and made sure he had the jacket on straight. Then they'd fussed with the ties on the calves of his pants, and made sure his short hair was smoothed down as best as it could be.

"He needs liner," Elise said, tracing under her eye.

Damon choked. In the few pictures he'd seen of Kynastons, some of them had blue liner beneath their eyes. "No. I'm not doing that." He looked to Milla for help.

She shoved off from the bunk. "Mother, you can't dangle too juicy a prize. Or look too cheap, like you're trying to pass off a lesser Kynaston."

Damon hunched. This was not his idea. He didn't want their clothes and their aristocratic mannerisms, not even if they'd convinced him it was necessary. He stared hard at the deck, fingers curling at his sides.

"Stand up straight, boy," Elise snapped.

"If you keep calling him boy, he's going to keep acting like one." Milla pivoted and reached for Damon's ear, then hesitated.

"I need to pierce it," she said. "Both of them. May I?"

Bile rose and he pulled back. "No." Slaves had no piercings, they could not wear any marks of status.

"I'm sorry, I only remembered your ears weren't pierced when I borrowed the diamond studs from Seamus. We all have piercings." Milla waved between herself and her mother. "It'll look odd if you don't."

Milla's ears hung with multiple baubles, and Elise had a single, large ruby stud in each ear, shining like blood. He drew a long breath. They would take everything he had left of who he was.

Milla, Campa, and Elise had cornered him the day before and laid out the situation with the ship. They'd told him that for all of them to live, he had to convince a woman called the Countess that he was a Kynaston. He had to be Kynaston.

Before Andavar, he'd only wanted to get away from the Resistance, to melt back into obscurity. That option was gone now. Whatever had forced him to decrypt had made him permanently and visibly Kynaston, to scanners and passing looks alike.

And how could he have told them no, that he wouldn't do it? He couldn't abandon Luc, or Milla, or Campa to Zivali. Or Alexi, as much it hurt Damon's head to think about him. Alexi was...something he had to live with now.

Damon, too, wanted to survive the next weeks.

"All right," he said, and Milla descended with a numbing spray. It was over quickly. He could feel the metal in his ear lobes, but he didn't reach up to touch the studs and did not look at himself in the washroom mirror.

Elise frowned. "If I had a solid month to train you..." She opened her hands. "This is what we have. Now. Tell me again what you will do once we board the Countess' station."

Anger tightened Damon's gut. "If you want me to be a Kynaston, don't treat me like a slave."

Elise's stare grew icy. "There's a big difference, young man, between a command to a junior and an order to a slave."

"He's not your junior," Milla said.

"On my ship--"

"It's Campa's ship, and your Resistance cell, but he's not your junior."

Mother and daughter glared at each other.

Damon wanted to be anywhere but in this room. It smelled of tension, and expensive cologne, and fear. He itched to shrink back into the washroom, or into his bunk. But he couldn't.