WE FLY LOW AND FAST over the bucking sea. A storm has risen over the Atlantic, heaving up mountainous waves of cresting foam. With a howl of joy over the coms, Sevro leads his squadron through a wall of water. They look like sea lions, their scarabSkin oily and glistening wet as they weave above and through the churn, red beacon lights blinking from the heels of their gravBoots.
I dive into a wave, Thraxa au Telemanus to my right, and rip back up toward the dark sky.
It is liberating to be an outlaw once again. Octavia was right. Legitimacy and reign come with heavy burdens. But so too has my emancipation. With Wulfgar’s death, I ignited a wildfire across the Republic that has shifted popular opinion against the war and my wife. Even incorruptible Caraval raves for my arrest. For the last month, we’ve been holed up in an abandoned military base on Greenland, preparing for this mission. From the too-small cot in the cold barracks, I’ve watched Mustang give speeches in the Senate and fend off calls for impeachment. If it weren’t for her summoning Wulfgar and the knights personally to her estate, she would be out of office. Somehow she clings on.
In the pale light of the old holoCan, she looks so pure, so above the tarnish that Wulfgar’s death has put on my soul. I can’t help but feel I’ve sullied her too with the blood of a good man. I project an air of jocular confidence to my men. Many of them knew Wulfgar. But at night, when the winds sweep in off the sea to howl against the concrete bunker, I’m plagued by the demons the world has given me. Even more so by those I’ve made for myself. I can only fall asleep to the sound of her voice.
They say Republics are naturally eager to devour their heroes. I always thought my Republic was the exception. Now, Copper and Red holoNews pundits, who once objected to the ArchWarden being an Obsidian, have made Wulfgar a martyr. They rail for my capture, declaring me a menace to peace. A warmonger. Useful once, a liability now. It wounds me, but not as much as it wounds Sevro. He blames himself for Wulfgar’s death, and has shrunken inward, growing sullen in the absence of his family. Fearful, I imagine, that his daughters will believe those who say we are wrong.
We may not ever be welcomed back.
There’s nothing worse for a soldier to imagine—that there will be no home to return to once the violence is over, no way to become the men we want to be. Instead, we’re trapped in these violent guises, guises we only ever had the courage to don because of how much we love our home. Is this all we’ll ever be? Is this what I’ve made Sevro become forever?
Republic Intelligence searches for us. I know many of those men and women. They’re no fools. But they search deep space for signs of my passage to Mars and Mercury, thinking I would retreat either to my homeworld or the legions, where the populace or military would rally around me. They still don’t understand me. The only thing that lies in the tunnels of Mars or upon the desert planet is the possibility of civil war. Were I to consolidate power, I would make Mars or the legions choose a side. I would rend our fledgling Republic in two. Exactly what I believe the Ash Lord intended. No. The key to Venus and to the end of this war isn’t with my army. It lies beneath the waves of Earth.
Our quarry, a lonely deep-sea trawler, glows on the horizon.
At the mercy of the waves, it rides a giant swell up and then disappears behind the range of foaming water. For a moment, I think it’s capsized. I bank up above the water, gaining altitude till I see it riding down the slope of a wave. It is one hundred meters from stem to stern. And as I descend upon it, I see its red paint has long since given way to rust and the gnaw of the sea. Huge yellow plastic crab containers at the back of the ship rock uneasily against their restraints. Men in yellow coats labor desperately to add extra lashings to tie the loose containers down. Another wave catches the ship and it rocks hard to port, throwing one of the men into the sea and snapping his safety cable.
“Mine!” Sevro says. There’s a chorus of challenges and the game is afoot. His squadron surges forward, some diving under the water, others bowing upward to retrieve the sailor. Breaking free of the pack, Alexandar au Arcos skims tight to the surface of the water, then recklessly close to the hull before slicing down into the water just before Sevro does. A moment later Alexandar resurfaces on the far side, spiraling in the air like a surfacing dolphin, dragging the sailor up by his severed safety cord. He lowers him roughly onto the deck and lands dramatically on a knee to a chorus of boos on the com.
“Superior genetics for the win,” he crows. “Be not ashamed, geriatric friends.”
“Shut your gob, Pixie,” Sevro mutters in defeat.
Sevro and the rest of his squadron emerge from the water around the boat and land with Alexandar amongst the terrified crabbers. Most of the crabbers are Red, with a scattering of Obsidians and Browns taken to the sea to make their living. I slow my speed and descend less dramatically to land nearer the pilot’s cabin. The captain, a bearded Brown with a continental-sized paunch, stares at me from the open hatch, his magnetic boots steadying him against the rocking of the ship.
“Plebian, are you the captain of this vessel?” I ask through my helmet in as haughty a Venusian accent as I can muster. He just stares at me, eyes fixed on the dull gray Society pyramid on my armor’s chest and on the demonic visages of the scarab masks. I am the world he thought gone forever, now returned. “Kneel,” I growl. The man falls to a knee. More Howlers land—only the tallest of our number, to complete the illusion—till there’s twelve of us clad in the military accoutrement of a Society commando squad. Our helmets, our masks for the day, remain on.
I feared resistance in the crew and am relieved to only see terror. They fall to their knees, eyes downcast in fear of their returned overlords. Only the two Obsidians amongst the crew stare up at us in hatred from under their water-repellant hoods.
“We’re just crabbers,” the captain mumbles, trying to come to grips with his new reality. “Nothin’ military on board…”
“Silence, whelp. You will address me as dominus. This ship, like you, is property of the Ash Lord. Prithee, Captain, assemble your men in the cargo hold and none of you will be liquidated.” I eye the Obsidians amongst his crew. “Any attempts on the lives of my men will result in the decimation of your crew in its entirety. Defiance is death. Do you understand?”
“Yes?”
“Yes, what?” Thraxa snarls.
“Yes…dominus.”
I feel a dark pit open in my gut and motion my men to take command of the vessel.
We commandeer the boat and deactivate their radio and satellite communications and consolidate the crabbers into the cargo hold with jugs of water. Pebble welds the doors shut in case they feel a flush of patriotism coming on. Soon, the rest of our number come with Colloway on his pelican. It floats above the water on the port side of the crabber and drops the submersible we took from our weapons cache on Luna’s orbital docks. The submersible lands with a huge splash. Then the pelican sets down on the exposed deck of the crabber. Some of the lowColor Howlers—Winkle, Min-Min, and Rhonna—disembark carrying gear. The rest of the support staff, including my brother Kieran, are on Baffin Island, waiting with our escape vessel.
Winkle, a nihilistic, sleepy-eyed Green, is our lead cyber operations officer. His face is a pincushion of piercings and fashionable digital tattoos. He’s particularly fond of monsters, and a blue dragon perches on his neck, its tongue slithering up his chin. His hair is acid green and defies gravity.
“Fuck. I’m already fucking seasick,” he says, lugging his equipment out. “I’ll never be able to work on this fucking floating tetanus trap.”
“Rough ride, Winkle?”
“Char flies like a madman.” He sniffs the air. “Ugh. Smells like an asshole after Venusian stew. Thraxa, doll, will you take me off this deck and to the coms.” Thraxa leads him away to the bridge. “Never thought I’d miss the gorydamn desert….”
I hop up into the ship and find Colloway finishing his landing protocols. “You hit turbulence?”
“Manmade,” he says. “Winkle talks too much.”
I laugh. “How’s the sky?”
“Civilian traffic only. If the Republic knows we’re here, they’re waiting till you go down.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I aim to please.” He winks. The older man is so handsome it’s easy to see why they make toy figurines in his likeness.
I hop off the craft and watch my niece bring Thraxa battery packs for her power hammer. No more than a third Thraxa’s weight, Rhonna looks a child even amongst the smaller Howlers. I had a mind to leave her behind at the Den, but she won’t be in harm’s way today. Had to give her a taste of action before the more dangerous Venus leg of the mission.
“She’s still bitter about the Iron Rain,” Pebble says to me at the base of Colloway’s ship.
“Well, pouting isn’t going to make me put her in the sub.”
“She just wants to prove herself.”
“And she can, when her life and someone else’s isn’t at risk.”
“She’s as old as we were when we fell in our first Rain.”
“And look at all the dumb shit we did.” I glance over at my friend. Her cherubic face looks younger than her thirty-three years. Bright, optimistic eyes look out from cheeks as flushed as they were when she rode back with Mustang after besting House Apollo. Without malice, but possessing incredible fortitude, Pebble has faced more battles by now than even Ragnar ever saw. Seems just yesterday that Cassius was mocking her at the feast before the Passage, along with Roque, Antonia, and Priam. We see who got the last laugh.
“You know, Pebs, if Sevro is the father of the Howlers, you just might be the mother.”
“Ha. I think that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all year, boss.” She wrinkles her nose as, across the deck, Sevro and Clown cackle to each other as they compete to see who can urinate farther over the side of the boat. “And what…interesting progeny we have.”
When we’ve reached our coordinates at six in the morning, I follow the rest of my men out onto the deck. My muscles ache from the hard gravity of Earth. It’s been some time since I labored in a gravity gym. The air on deck is crisp and clean, the ocean calm as it laps against the rusty hull. Rhonna leans against the starboard railing with her arms folded, in a mood at being left with the support platoon on the crabber. I join her as the others make their preparations.
“Remember to keep an eye on the jamming array,” I say. “Last thing we need is for one of the crew to get free and send out a signal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And make sure Winkle doesn’t snort too many amphetamines.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t worry, my goodlady,” Alexandar says, walking past with Milia. She’s a Gold from my army at the Institute who joined the Rising with the flood of minor Martian houses that declared themselves for Mustang after the Ash Lord nuked New Thebes. Alexandar and Milia are an odd pair. Milia looks as if she’s been recently resurrected, with pale skin, sunken cheeks, and the most nihilistic temperament I’ve ever met in a human. While Alexandar wouldn’t have been out of place as one of Antonia’s pretty concubines. That fine jaw and the white-gold hair that flutters behind him like a comet tail. Even I find myself resenting the boy at times. On the outside, he’s the picture of all I ever hated. “I’ll make sure I bring you a trophy, so long as the decks are clean and scrubbed. I want them shiny enough to eat off of,” Alexandar says with a grin.
Rhonna glowers at him.
“Can’t believe you’re taking that gilded shit,” she mutters. Her jealous eyes follow the Howlers going over the side. My brother was heartbroken when she signed up for the legion training at sixteen. She was assigned to a unit in the thick of fighting on Mercury, but by merit of her examinations I had pretext to bring her onto my personal staff as a lancer. She was not pleased.
“Rhonna, you’re just too short to pass as a Gray. We’re a Society commando squad. If you’re not six feet, you’re staying on the ship. Same goes for everyone.”
“Not Min-Min.”
“Min-Min is staying in the sub. Besides, she’s a veteran.”
“You don’t think I can handle myself. Do you?” She jerks her head at the Howlers. “The rest of them think that I’m only your lancer because you’re my blood. They think I’m just dead weight.”
“No one thinks that.”
“Colloway literally said that to me.”
“Colloway is an asshole. Listen, if you weren’t my blood, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or I’d get a new lancer. You can’t have it both ways. Suck it up. Do your job, and you’ll get your chance.”
Her jaw works. “Yes, sir.”
I find Sevro watching me from the other side of the ship. “What?”
“You remind me of my father more every day.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”
“Me neither.” He snorts. “I want to say again, for the potentially posthumous record, that this is a shit idea.”
“Do you have another way onto Luna?” I ask.
“About a dozen that don’t include releasing a psychopath.”
“A dozen which you, me, Thraxa, and Pebble all picked apart. I thought you agreed to this.”
“It’s important the mutts think we’re synced up,” he says. “But I still don’t like it. Didn’t you learn anything from the Jackal?”
“The Jackal didn’t have a bomb in his brain.”
“I still say we should steal a Gold ship,” he says stubbornly.
“And how would we find one?” I ask. “Patrol the inner orbits and pray any fully-rigged ships of war we see don’t outgun us? If we do manage to board, fight our way through a battalion of space legionnaires, they’ll frag their codebank as soon as we board and transmit a distress signal. That means we show up at Venus, which is guarded by the totality of Society naval power, injured, depleted from corridor fighting, with nothing but our pricks in our hands. And after all that, we’d still need an army once we land there.”
“Then we stop by Mercury and pick up some legions.”
“Which of our friends will we have to kill then?” I ask sharply, and nod to the water. “This psychopath is our key, our army, and our escape plan.”
He lets me finish, unimpressed. “I once saw a man try to ride a shark….”
“Where the hell did you see that?”
“Europa.”
“When?”
“Callin’ me a liar?” He glares at me. “Point is we won’t be able to control him.”
“Then we kill him.”
“That’s my job.”
“Sure, if you down more guards than me. If I win, I get the honor.”
We shake on it.
Outside the door to the submersible, I pause, hesitating before ducking into the narrow hatchway. Once I was a creature of tunnels and caverns. I felt safe in close confines. The Jackal twisted that nature in me. My body itself remembers the cold walls of his table and rebels against me every time I approach narrow spaces. I hide my fear from my men and slip through the hatch.
Thirty minutes later, the submersible sinks into the sea. With the Obsidians absent, we’ve had to combine my unit heavy knight with Sevro’s Ghosts—Alexandar, Clown, Thraxa, Pebble, and Milia. Their multiRifles carry nonlethal spider venom munitions for meat targets and electrical rounds for armor. Ink black in their scarabSkin, they’re packed behind me in the passenger hold. It’ll be a tight fit on the ride up with our cargo. Min-Min steers the submersible from her seat in the nose with her hands in gel controls. Through the reinforced forward viewports, there’s nothing but gray water. As we dive deeper, out of reach of the sun’s rays, the hull creaks. The pressure builds and the water blackens as the ocean squeezes us into its fist and drags us down and down.
It takes us an hour to reach the abyssal plain at the bottom of the sea. A halo of lights around the front of the submersible illuminates the sand of the ocean floor. Out there in the darkness, three Poseidon-class Republic submarines patrol the Porcupine Abyssal Plain that stretches from the west coast of the British Isles to the slopes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Up on the deck of the crab trawler, under protection by Rhonna and the others, Winkle is embedded deep in the cyberscape, linked in to the Republic’s Starhall mainframe through a back door Theodora had her men prepare for him. The location of the sentinel submarines blinks on a holographic display to the right of Min-Min’s navigation controls. The nearest one is two hundred kilometers southeast, patrolling in a circular arc around her charge.
We creep along the bottom of the ocean, undetected. Designed for future war on Europa, this prototype—stolen by Sevro last week—was built with sonar-resistant skin in a Republic lab on Earth. He disguised the theft by detonating explosives in the warehouse. I had Winkle issue a false press release from the Red Hand taking credit for the sabotage. By the time the authorities clear the rubble and the Red Hand disavows, we’ll already be on our way to Venus and they’ll think this was all the work of Society commandos and their Securitas agents. So I hope.
Fifty kilometers from our destination, we enter into the drone defense grid and cut our lights. Up on the boat, Winkle accesses the drones via the mainframe and puts the data acquisition from the drones on loop. We pass through the defense grid.
Clown shifts uncomfortably between Milia and Thraxa. “If Winkle’s wrong and they spot us…”
“Shut up,” Sevro mutters.
“I’m just saying dying here at the bottom of the sea, caged by lung-crushing pressure, is not how I expected to go.”
“How did you expect to go?”
“Well, smothered under tits, actually.”
“Thraxa, I can’t reach my husband. Hit him for me?” Pebble says.
Clown holds up his hands. “A joke, darling! All I’m saying is that this is essentially a metal coffin.” Milia looks at him with sullen eyes and Clown smiles awkwardly.
The thought of this being a metal coffin makes my skin crawl again. But no torpedo comes and we press through the grid. After this, Republic cyber forensics will discover Winkle’s back door and we’ll be severed from the Republic’s information network. It’s a hard price to pay, but worth it if it gets us onto Venus. I only hope Theodora isn’t incriminated. With her position in Starhall’s intelligence bureau, she’s too valuable to my wife to be spent on me.
“You hear that?” Sevro asks. I strain my ears, hearing nothing at first, then something like a heartbeat. It vibrates softly through the hull of the ship. The heartbeat grows louder. Thickening, multiplying till it sounds like a wooden stick dragged down a rib cage. Then we see it through shadow and silt.
Our quarry.
Deep in the darkness of the ocean moves a huge, humped behemoth. A shadow that glitters with lights upon its dark crest. The lights bathe its metal carapace in pale blue. I’ve seen it on schematics before, but in the metal flesh, it’s a dreadful sight of an older age. The prison is like a giant primordial crab crawling along the abyssal plain. A dome ribbed with intake vents and docking stations and barbed with antennae monopolizes its cephalothoric bulk. The dome sits upon a legion of barnacle-covered hydraulic metal legs that thump against the sand as they drag the station across the ocean floor. Several long umbilical tubes hang from the belly of the dome to suck refuse and litter into her recycling processors and incinerators. Inside her belly, she holds trash of a fouler sort.
For four hundred years, Deepgrave Prison has crawled the abyssal plains of Earth’s oceans, sucking up the sins of Old Earth and punishing the sinners of the Society—murderers, rapists, terrorists, political prisoners. Now, war criminals.
One of Mustang’s many reforms in her first days of power was the abolition of the death penalty in the Republic. Informed by revolutions of Old Earth, she feared that it would be abused to mete out fraudulent justice to deposed or innocent Golds and mark the Republic with a stain of genocide that could never be washed out. But she couldn’t pass it while the Jackal was alive. It would be seen as nepotistic. The day she pulled Adrius’s feet, she abolished capital punishment. All the war criminals, all the oppressors, slavers, and murderers whom I would have hanged, are here.
And now I’ve come to free one of the worst.
Min-Min guides our submersible through the legs of Deepgrave, banking us up to the underside of the dome. The hull shudders violently as she engages the magnetic couplers and the submersible’s top hull locks into place, creating a pressurized seal between our thermal drill and the prison’s hull. The drill whirs above us as energy from the engines funnels into the drill’s heat coils.
When the drill has finished, it retracts back and shifts sideways into its cooling sheath. Sevro waits several minutes for the heat to dissipate before cranking open the top exit hatch of the submersible. On the other side of the hatch, the circular block of hull from the carved hole is suspended by a gravity well built into the submersible’s penetration system. From the cockpit, Min-Min reverses the gravity and the block floats up into the station.
“Hats on,” I say, donning my scarabSkin helmet. My vision goes dark and then the heads-up display flickers to life, brightening the confines of the submersible with its spectral amplifiers. The vitals and names of my friends appear above their heads.
I step toward the hatch to go first, but Sevro puts a hand on my chest. “Trying to get a head start?” I ask.
“Don’t be so competitive, boyo.”
Milia and Clown go in front of me to take point, shouldering their multiRifles. Thraxa follows, her pulseHammer magnetically coupled to a holster on her back. Min-Min swings out of her pilot seat and tosses one of her drones into the air. Small as a thumb and matte black, the projectile races up the hole. She surveys through its cameras and gives us the thumbs-up.
“Playtime.”
The two point Howlers climb the ladder up to the hatch and then go weightless as the gravWell grips them and eases them up through the hole. Sevro removes his hand from my chest.
“Your turn, princess.”
Using the schematics stored in Starhall’s data vault, I chose the water filtration room as our point of entry. It’s dark, full of noise, and entirely automated. Huge machines suck in seawater and desalinate it for the use of the guards and the prisoners. I call up the map on my HUD and a blue waypoint flares to life, marking our target’s cell. White footprints glow on the display, illustrating the path we chose.
I shoulder my rifle and lead them up out of the desalination plant. We move in silence. A station mechanic’s breathing is amplified by my helmet. He glows like a humanoid coal through a hulking photoelectrical oxygen splitter. I move forward, crouched. Then Sevro runs past me and slides to round the corner first. There’s the soft sound of a spider venom round hissing out the narrow barrel of his short-stock rifle. A body crumpling. Sevro hogties the man with plastic restraints and comes back around holding up one finger.
“One.”
Leaving the desalination level behind, we move through the lower bowels of the station like a silent nocturnal animal made of fourteen legs and arms. The station relies on its external defenses, which would eviscerate even a heavy assault force of the Ash Legions, but on the inside, the security systems were made to keep men in, not out.
We subdue several workers sipping coffee from thermoses as they set to their morning work, Sevro and I racing each other to be the first to hit them with our spider rounds. He’s better with firearms than I am, and it’s already four-to-one in his favor as we pass through heavy reinforced security doors so thick they appear to have been made by some ancient race. They’re old and rusted, like the rest of the bones and shell of this dilapidated crab station. Only the sinew is new. Glowing biometric scanners. Sun Industry drones. Crowd-suppressant gas nodules in the ceilings. All neutralized by Winkle’s access into the mainframe.
We activate our ghostCloaks and slip into the open door of a guard station outside the massive doors to the high-security Omega Level. The guards gab to one another over tin breakfast bowls and drink Terran coffee spiced with chicory. To ensure loyalty to the Rising, most of the guards are from my planet. While the political officers are mostly Reds, and wear the Vox Populi inverted pyramid badges sewn into their uniforms to declare their affiliation to the proletariat, the bulk of the guards are still Grays.
Once, I hated Grays. Ugly Dan and the rest of the tinpots that lorded over Lykos left a foul impression. But years on, I respect their discipline, their devotion to duty. And I pity them. For centuries they’ve been the frontline soldiers and battlefield pawns of Golds in house warfare. And now they toil for our Republic.
I remind myself of the endgame: this will end the war. It must.
What will they do then?
Not more than three steps behind the breakfasting guards, I stand in the doorway, a rippling translucent shadow in the ghostCloak. From inside the cloak, the guards are distorted like a child’s crayon rendering. For them it’s another tedious day of gloom in a six-month shift. They’re counting down the hours till they can spend their mandatory thirty minutes in the UV beds to get their vitamin D, and smoke burners in the common room and watch porn experientials on their holoVisors. A thick Gray man with a bulldog neck sniffs the air. He’s in a black uniform, a member of their tactical response squad. He should be a lurcher, but we couldn’t spare specialists down here. They’re needed on the front lines.
He grunts. “Does it smell like wet dog in here?”
“Warden’s pooch don’t leave the roost no more.”
“Someone oughta shoot that poor little shit, out of mercy. It smells like it’s inside out.”
One of the guards looks appraisingly at the contents of his bowl. “Smells like rotten algae to me.”
The man in the black sniffs the air again. “It’s definitely dog.”
“Sorry. That’s just me,” Sevro says. The guard turns in his seat, tracking the sound to the door, where the casual eye might think us a fault in his vision or a premonition of a migraine, but his fixed gaze sees us for what we are. His cracked lips part no wider than a finger’s width when two spider rounds hit him in the neck.
A barrage of puffs and a dozen rounds punch into the flesh of half a dozen men as they try to stand from their chairs. They tremble on the ground as the paralytic agent spreads through their bodies. We deactivate our ghostCloaks and take over the section station, piling the men in a corner. They’ll have a devil’s headache this time tomorrow and might lose their sight for a few days, but they’ll survive. “Six–three,” Sevro says to me. Pebble and Alexandar set up to receive guests if an alarm is raised. The rest of us press into the Omega Level.
The lion’s share of the prison’s general population is housed in levels high above this one. They have communal cells and labor in crews every day from six A.M. to six P.M., hand-sorting the refuse sucked in by the umbilical tubes for recycling or incineration. There’s sanity in an honest day’s work. I would know.
But here on the Omega Level, those who were sentenced by the Republic courts for crimes against humanity languish in solitary confinement, never to see another face. Never to hear another voice. Or feel anything but the touch of the cold metal. They are given water and an algae protein gel through a tube in the wall and allowed to exercise in the common area for fifteen minutes every other day. But when they exercise, they do so alone. No prisoners with which to share their burdens. Just an echoing mausoleum of cold, faceless cell doors without window or crack or key. I’ve heard that the guards will sometimes play a holo for them in the center of the floor, but if they do, it is triumphant moments of the Republic.
The Republic might be above murdering its prisoners, but its morality is not without teeth. It wasn’t what Mustang had in mind when she abolished the death penalty, but Publius cu Caraval has blocked every resolution for prison reform for the past six years. Some say it’s because he’s beholden to campaign contributors. My suspicion is that he lost more to Gold than he lets on. For my part, I agree with him. These men and women chose to put themselves above their fellow men. So let them now be separate. Forever.
Most of my enemies lie in the ground. The rest I put here. Boneriders fill some of these cells. The Jackal’s own. I only wish we’d been able to throw Lilath in this pit instead of giving her the easy way out by shooting down her destroyer till it crashed into Luna’s surface. In coming down here to free one of them, I wonder if I am becoming the traitor that the newsreels say I am.
We pause outside a cell door. “Is everyone going to behave themselves?”
“Are you, bossman?” Clown asks. “You almost cut off his head last time.”
“Almost,” I say. The sight of the Gold in the dark hall on that Luna night, his bare face covered in Howler blood, has not left me. Sometimes I wake from sleep thinking he’s outside my door, waiting to come in. Waiting to kill my family. “Sevro…are you going to be civil?”
He shrugs.
“Good enough.”
I disengage the lock. The door whines and the blue light encircling the handle goes dark. Steeling myself, I crank the handle and haul back the door, stepping out of the way of my men with their raised rifles. We’re hit with the smell of algae and feces. The cell is a dank concrete box. Empty but for a toilet, a plastic sleeping pallet, and a shirtless, gaunt man. He faces away from us, asleep. His spine like a fossil in dust through sun-starved skin. Greasy white hair spills off the side of the pallet. He turns to look at us with black eyes sunk deep in a tattooed face. I take an involuntary step back, seeing my time with the Jackal in the man’s body.
“What the hell? That’s an Obsidian,” Sevro says.
“Winkle, the package is missing,” I say. “Are you certain he is in cell O-2983?”
“Positive. I’m looking at the roster now. He’s stated as present in his cell. No medical intake info or labor duty. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Then who the hell is this?” Sevro asks. The prisoner stands very slowly. He’s no giant like Sefi. He stands barely six and a half feet and is as thin as Alexandar. He’s past fifty, with a deeply receding hairline, a filthy beard, and more tattoo ink than I’ve ever seen on a man.
He watches us with intelligent, curious eyes. Not holding himself like a warrior, but as if he were a sinister mathematician studying string theory on a holoboard. A set of tattoo spirit eyes stare at me when he blinks. The only men who wear that ink are shaman of the Ice. And most of them are women.
Sevro steps toward the Obsidian, gun raised. “Who the hell are you? Answer, shithead.”
The Obsidian smiles with his eyes, looks at the gun, then to Sevro’s mask, back to the gun, then gestures to his mouth with a single finger. He opens it wide. Sevro shines a light inside. “Gross.” He steps back. “Someone cut off his tongue.” And that’s not all they took. What I first took for a receding hairline I see now is a half-completed scalping. It makes the front of his head look indented, like the bottom of an egg.
“His hands…” Thraxa says.
“Let’s see your hands,” I say.
He cooperates without protest. Embedded in the back of the knotted hands are the crescents of the Obsidian caste. Black. Not the bleached white of a prisoner. “You’re not a prisoner.” He finds my eyes, even through my opaque helmet, wags one finger and then sketches a shield over his heart. “Guard?” He points a finger at me. Yes.
“You get lost?” Sevro asks.
The Obsidian thinks, then makes a fist and pounds it into the small of his back, like he’s being stabbed. I watch him with greater interest. Why was a guard stabbed in the back?
“The prisoner 1126. Did he do this to you?” Thraxa asks. The man wags a finger no. “Do you know where he is?” No.
“Winkle, can you track 1126’s implant or collar?” I ask, turning back to my task.
“No. It’s not on the system.”
“What do you mean it’s not on the system? He can’t have left the damn station. He’s a prisoner of the state. He’s on code black, no transfer. No one in history has escaped from Deepgrave.”
“Your dad did,” Clown says to Sevro.
“That wasn’t exactly an escape,” Sevro mutters under his breath. “I swear to the Vale, if that slimy shit has been out in the worlds all this time…”
“Do we really need him in particular?” Clown asks. “We got our pick of sociopaths.”
“Boss…” Thraxa says.
“We’ll have to take a look around,” I say. “We need to find him.”
“There’s two hundred guards here,” Sevro says. “Can’t sneak around not knowing where we’re going. If the alarm goes, shit will get mortal, fast.”
“Boss…” Thraxa says.
“I know it’s not ideal—” I say.
“Not ideal?” Clown interrupts. “The alarm goes, the subs will know we’re here and we’ll never get back to the trawler.”
Underneath my scarabSkin, my son’s key dangles from its chain, cool and heavy. I didn’t leave him to tuck tail and run at the first sign of friction.
“Do you want to leave empty-handed?” I ask, my tone even, but the implication lacerating. They shake their heads.
“Boss!” Thraxa shoves me hard from the side, almost knocking me down.
“What?”
She jerks her head to the Obsidian. “I think he knows how to find 1126.”