The Scent of Memory

By Shari Elder

Twelve years ago, Marisol lost Aren. Now he’s back—pointing a gun at her head and treating her like a stranger.

Rebel hacker, Marisol Martinez, never thought volunteering to keep the hospital safe from cyborgs would lead her back to the man sabotage ripped from her arms. The man she swore to avenge by any means possible.

For over a decade, Cap protected the cyborgs under his command from every danger. Until he meets an insurgent, whose scent wreaks havoc on his control. She calls him Aren and insists she knows him. But she’s wrong. He has no past, no present, no future—only orders he’s programmed to complete.

Forced together, Marisol and Cap can’t resist the passion that keeps building between them. With time running out, Marisol must use her computer skills to restore Aren’s memories or Cap will kill all subversives on the planet—starting with her

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight Publishing
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780369502759

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Published by EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ® at Smashwords

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2020 Shari Elder

ISBN: 978-0-3695-0275-9

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Audrey Bobak

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

Thanks to all the Evernight staff for their hard work and support for making this book a reality.

THE SCENT OF MEMORY

Green Rising, 2

Shari Elder

Copyright © 2020

Chapter One

As she did every night, Marisol Martinez loitered in the shadow of her daughter’s bedroom door, sinking into the blended smell of watercolor paints, dog hair, and greenhouse sugar. A maelstrom of grief and anger punched through her chest, threatening to break through the wall of stoicism she built around her barely beating heart. Ariana carried Aren’s scent, was his last impossibly beautiful creation and the only remaining piece of the man death ripped violently from her life. Marisol inhaled deeper, shoving the sorrow back down and using the air to navigate through the tendrils of aroma the way Aren taught her. Seconds later, she honed onto the unique floral trace that distinguished Ariana from Aren. A small gift, but enough to calm the angry tremor in her hands and allow her heart to pump enough to be with Ariana.

The negative emotions forced back into their box, Marisol knocked on the door, then walked in. Ariana was stuffing something under her pillow. Her unruly black hair bobbing as she moved. What was that? Marisol said, managing to keep her voice light. A whiff of Ariana’s sweat flicked on her worry light.

Her daughter flopped on her back and sat up. Those unique, cobalt-blue eyes, like crushed sapphires, widened with fabricated innocence. Is it time to say our secret vows, Mama? Eleven-year-old Ariana sidestepped conversations like a pro.

Marisol nodded, letting the action go for now. Let’s say them together. Her daughter’s return smile triggered a rush of love so tender it filled the dark empty places Aren left inside her. She wanted to wrap Ariana in cotton and steel and keep her safe forever. Her clever baby would never allow that, so she started the vows. We envision a world…

Of abundance for all, want for none, Arianna added her voice. A world of compassion, justice, and integrity. A world where we can say these vows openly and not in hidden whispers.

Ariana’s tone lowered near the end of the recitation. She wiped at her eyes, then stuck one hand under the pillow, pulled out a picture, and handed it to her. Marisol’s heart thudded wildly in her chest as she reached for the photo with clammy hands. Her head burst with warning screeches. Gripping the cool, glossy paper so tightly it buckled from the pressure as she slowly turned it over. When she saw Aren’s crooked smile and laughing cobalt eyes, and the albino puppy with a golden bow tied around his neck that he held out toward the camera, her heart broke all over again. Aren Dougherty. The father Ariana never knew. The love Marisol could never move beyond. She thought she’d destroyed this photo of her last birthday with him. A week before he died. Two weeks before she learned she was pregnant.

I look at it every night and wish him into my dreams. Ariana’s confession dragged her back to her daughter.

He’s never left mine, sweetheart. She pulled her daughter close, stroking her untamed curls. She swam in that floral scent to keep the sorrow at bay.

Is that why you work so hard? Why I never see you? Her voice crawled out small and scared.

Marisol’s heart shattered, the pieces painful and disfigured. Her commitment to the Gren an Dane, the rebel coalition looking to create a more democratic intergalactic society based on abundance, not scarcity, was the only thing that allowed her to survive Aren’s death.

I work hard because of the vow we just made. Because I want a better world for you and justice for your father, the man I will never stop loving.

All I want is to see you more, Mommy. That would be my better world. Tear-filled eyes looked up at her. Am I selfish?

Marisol crumpled. The last vestiges of her stoic veneer ripped away as she let herself fully see the price her daughter paid for her commitment to the Gren and her unwavering drive to find justice for Aren. It got her out of bed when she wanted to bury herself in dreams, to have a purpose when her life had been destroyed beyond recognition. She owed them. As she wiped her daughter’s tears, and looked, really looked at her baby girl, softly blooming into womanhood, she swore to owe them a little less. If she didn’t let some of the anger go, she’d lose this last part of Aren and the beauty that was Arianna herself.

No, my … dearest. She struggled through the words. Her voice caught on the cocktail of emotions churning through her body. It’s not you. I’m the selfish one, trying to avenge your father, when you needed me. We’ll spend more time together. I promise. Tomorrow, we’ll make a plan.

Ariana snuggled into her arms. I love you, Mama.

I love you. Beyond words and vows, sweetheart. Always and forever.

Sketch, a seventy-pound Nordikan mush-dog, struggled onto the bed, trying to insert himself in the family hug. At twelve, Sketch had lost most of his agility and wheezed and farted through the night. His once-bright pink eyes hazed over with glaucoma. The puppy he had been helped Marisol survive the mining accident. He’d moved onto Ariana’s bed once she came into the world and became her daughter’s constant companion. If he was a bit loud and smelly in his final years and needed extra help, he earned it. She ruffled his white fur. Ariana opened an arm to invite him into the circle.

Marisol held Ariana until she slept, then slipped out of her daughter’s arms, patted the snoring dog, and went to her own bedroom. The festive red blanket covered with black and white mush dogs, now threadbare, draped on the back of the chair provided the only color in her cell of a room. She only kept that because it had been Ariana’s baby blanket and permanently held her unique floral scent. The keepsake energized her when she got tired and kept her going when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She wanted no distractions, no memories here in the room she should have shared with Aren. She’d transformed the room from a nest to the cold center of her search for justice. Almost monk-like in its lack of personal effects, only a picture of Ariana, in a frame her daughter decorated herself, held audience on her grid interface. The little girl looked lost next to all buttons, keys, and toggles needed to maneuver clandestinely around the intergalactic grid.

She parked herself in the white seat and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. She attached the grid interface into the port installed at the base of her skull, hidden under her own mass of wild curls. As plug and port connected, slivers of pleasure shuddered through her system until the boundaries of the woman and the data universe blurred into one. After checking and double-checking the layers of security she’d devised to cover her nightly forays on the grid, she followed the data stream into the personal logs of Deba Allara, one of the few survivors of a tenement disaster on the planet of New Caledonia. One building blew, and the fire raged through eight others. It occurred during daylight hours when children were in school, thank the gods, but it took the lives of over forty adult casino workers who worked the night shift. Deba was only one of three who escaped, and the only one who kept an audio journal.

Once, she never would have entered anyone’s personal grid space. That Marisol died with Aren as did her naïve belief that the world was fair and that boundaries mattered. She never planned to snoop. But once she got used to hacking Coalition security files, technical assessments, and disaster witness accounts, the jump into personal records simply flowed into the next step. It wasn’t as if she was using the information against these people. It was just that intergalactic federations were too good at covering their tracks. Official data was empty data.

Marisol had also discovered that memories of trauma dripped out haphazardly, in blips of memory and drops of insight. So, night after night, she searched for the scent—a unique blending of sulphur, pine, and vanilla—that marked certain disasters, like the one that took Aren from her. The Gren was sure these weren’t accidents. That distinctive aroma marked mishaps across the federations that governed the known universe. After collecting and analyzing data for twelve years, they still could not fathom why they happened nor prove sabotage.

She would never give up until she figured out who was responsible for the Odin mine disaster. Aren and his mining team deserved justice. Ariana deserved to know why she never met her father.

Marisol wanted blood.

Chapter Two

Red lights flared, blinding Gold Captain’s human eye. Move immediately to the escape pods. Repeat. Move immediately to the escape pods. Ten minutes until auto-destruct. The metallic voice of the ship’s computer blasted in his ears.

Using the speed built into his cyborg implants, he sprinted through the corridors. His metal-reinforced boots clanked against the titanium floors.