Yna has lost her friends, family, and world. She wears the marks of torture on her skin and blames the man who couldn’t save her in time.
When the Guardsman who couldn’t save her comes to beg for a favour, she is hesitant, outraged, and refuses. When he tells her that woman’s life is at stake, she agrees.
Marked to blend in with his people, Yna is going to pretend to love a man she resents in order to save his sister from public execution if her secret is discovered. It is a good thing that she used to be in show business.
More From Tales of the Citadel
Yna smiled as she slowly moved through the crowd surrounding the exhibit. The wealthiest and most corrupt folk in the sector were there, and she was going to take them for everything they had.
Cocktails flowed freely, and the guests enjoyed the extinction menagerie that had been assembled for them.
Yna moved among the guests with her tray, taking pats on her backside in turn with the dispensing of beverages. Her tunic was modest, but it didn’t stop the more lascivious guests from trying to get a hand under it as she made her rounds.
She kept her smile fixed and her pace steady, making her way around the room in a designated pattern. The other servers were doing the same as the bidders gathered around the next specimen up for auction.
Yna wasn’t the second server to disappear, but she was the fourth, tucking herself into the tube that launched her down into her shielded bunker.
From her safe space, she set the program in place to launch all of the ships on the station, blow the only connection to her chamber, and drain the accounts of the rich and powerful, diverting the funds to a million charities across the sector.
Each and every guest to her station had authorized all payments from the station as required for this one day. She was simply sending a searching account virus to find it all and move it elsewhere.
The ships would circle back in twelve hours, and by then, the arrogant idiots who had come to purchase living beings would know that they had been taken, leaving only the clothing on their backs.
Yna didn’t whistle, didn’t make a sound as she worked to reroute the thefts through the two thousand outlets to disguise their eventual resting places.
She moved around her tiny shielded cubicle and sat in the cradling chair when she was working. The time ticked by, and soon, all the life signs on the decks above were gone.
Just to be on the safe side, she opened all the bay doors and flushed the atmosphere out of the station. The walls of her cubicle shuddered, but they remained intact.
Yna keyed up her vessel and shut the doors that lead to her private shuttle bay. A mask and breathing unit were all she needed while she used a small charge to blow the access back to the bidding room. The bots she had designed to look like her had taken a bit of a beating. She settled them in their cubicles and programmed the necessary repairs.
She set the holographic generators to dormant and looked at her trap. It was amazing to her that she had pulled this con seven times and no one was the wiser.
Grinning inside her mask, she headed to her ship and set the station to re-form itself. The key to a convincing con was location, location, location. Right now, she was needed back at Citadel Balen. The day job called.
