After rehearsing a takedown move at least a hundred times, I finally manage to get Trey flat on his back. Breathing heavily, I pounce on his chest triumphantly. Straddling him, I ask, “Did you just let me beat you?”
He hesitates. “No,” he lies.
“Ugh! Little white lies are beneath you, Trey. I need more practice.”
“You’re doing fine. I’ve been fighting for a long time. I don’t know what kind of practice you can do now that will make up for that.”
“I need an equalizer.”
I see the reluctant agreement in Trey’s eyes. “Yes. You do. But it has to be one that your enemy can’t easily take from you and then use against you.” His words remind me of the incident in the Beezway with Kesek Alez, when he took the harbinger away from me like he was taking a toy from a child. “I have an idea,” he says.
He sits up and lifts me up as he gets to his feet. Playfully, he tosses me on the bed before he moves toward a display console built into the far wall.
There’s a menagerie of crystal figurines on the shelves. Some of the cut-glass images are of animals and some are Etharian forms—dancers and musicians. Trey touches a drawer and it slides open. He extracts a long, black lacquer box. Tucking it under his arm, he closes the drawer. Then he selects a few of the crystal figurines from the shelves and brings them back with him to the bed.
Sitting cross-legged on the middle of the bed, I scoot over to make a little more room for him to join me. He does. Sitting cross-legged too, he sets the black lacquer box in front of me.
“What’s this?” I ask him, looking at the box curiously.
“What you’re looking for.”
I try to lift the lid, but it won’t open.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot that it’s security locked.” Trey places his hand on the lid of the box. A blue light scans it. A decisive click sounds as the catch of the lid unlatches.
“How come you can open it?”
“I gave this to Charisma,” he says, like it’s no big deal.
Instantly, I’m irrationally jealous. “Really,” I respond by snapping the lid closed again. “Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it then.”
Trey frowns. “I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. I gave these to Charisma as from one friend to another. She wouldn’t mind if you use them. She’d want you to be safe.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you know very little about how women think?” I ask him.
“I know Charisma very well. You, on the other hand, are often a mystery to me.”
I don’t know whether to be offended, jealous, or flattered by that statement. As it turns out, I’m a little bit of all three.
He places his hand on the lid again, letting the security program scan it. “You need this, so whether or not either of you likes the fact that you’re borrowing it doesn’t really matter that much to me.”
When the lid unlatches once more, Trey opens it without preamble. Inside, the box is lined with lavender-colored satin. Resting in the center of the bed of satin are two silver cuffs. The jewelry is Gothic in design; each resembles the framework that holds panes of stained glass in a lavish church window, but without the colored glass itself.
I raise my eyebrow at Trey. “If these are some kind of freaky, sexy restraints—”
Trey’s shoulder nudges against mine as he chuckles softly, like I’m joking. “No,” he replies, before grinning and showing all his perfect teeth. “Sweet furroo, I love you. But, no, these are weapons, though I like where your mind is going—”
I have no idea what sweet furroo means, but a part of me wants desperately to hear him say it again with the same sexy groan. Instead, I nudge my shoulder against his arm to stop him from whatever he’s about to say. “Just show me what you have here.”
Lifting one of the cuffs from the box, I see it’s clearly made to fit a feminine forearm. I depress a small groove in the side of the cuff, and it opens with the spring of a hinge.
“This is a sonic sayzer, Kricket,” Trey says. He lifts my wrist with his other hand and pushes back the silky material of my robe. Delicately, he clasps the cool metal device to my forearm. It’s heavier than I expected, weighing at least a pound. “It can kill things—”
“—with sound,” we say together.
Trey looks up at my face. “That’s right. How did you know that?”
“Defense Minister Telek explained it to me when he was showing me Manus’s wounds. He had Manus in a tank in his office.”
“Telek’s one sick Etharian,” Trey replies grimly. Looking back to my wrist, he adjusts the cuff so that it’s properly balanced before he closes it over my skin.
“Well, the poison I gave him probably didn’t help with that either,” I reply.
A small, reluctant smile forms on his lips. “You’re so intelligent. You probably don’t even need this weapon. You just need time to assess a situation to find the best solution.”
“I’d feel better if I had something like this, though. So, how does it work?”
Trey flips my hand over so that it’s palm up. He touches the metal column of the device, stroking the metal plate over my wrist. A lavender-colored beam of light shines on my open palm. The light projects a keypad on my hand. Trey begins entering codes to the prompts. After he enters the first series of numbers, letters, and symbols, the metal on my wrist warms and becomes malleable, shrinking to fit me like a snug sleeve. The metal takes on the feel of stiff fabric as it moves to just below my elbow. The cuff grows over the top of my hand, threading through the gap between my index finger and my middle finger, my middle finger and my ring finger, and again between my ring finger and my pinky.
I turn my hand over several times, examining the fit and structure of the weapon I’m wearing, or is wearing me, depending upon how you look at it. “They’re going to love me at the Robotic Renaissance festival this year,” I say softly, admiring the arching metal design. It’s engraved with scrollwork that resembles Trey’s tattoo.
Trey doesn’t laugh; he only looks confused. “Any festivals you were planning to attend have probably been canceled, Kricket.”
I nod, not wanting to explain. “You’re probably right. How does this work?” I ask instead.
Trey rises from the bed and moves back to the display cabinet where he retrieved the sonic sayzer. He opens a different drawer and extracts a small, black conelike apparatus. He takes it and moves back toward the window wall at the far end of the room. Setting the conelike apparatus on the floor, he squats down and touches a few buttons. Light pours up from the machine on the floor, projecting holographic stars over the room in that area. “Dim lights,” Trey orders, and the room darkens, allowing us to see the galaxy of stars more clearly.