IT IS MY LAST DAY on Luna. Still dark cycle, but the sunrise stains the east. I sit watching the fledgling dawn with a glass of vodka from the heated terrace of a hotel suite I’ve rented. Tomorrow Volga and I will take the private shuttle I chartered to Earth, where all enemies of the state go to disappear. Digital monitoring on the old planet hasn’t quite caught up to Luna’s. Mars was an option, but it’s too unstable for my taste. I’ve been drinking since word reached me earlier that one of the Syndicate heavies killed a Red girl near the warehouse. I pour a glass of vodka for the little rabbit. Add a zoladone for myself.
She will have died bloody and scared in an alleyway. Hacked apart by hatchets and blades, just like her family. The ache of it in my chest fades as the zoladone spreads its cool, careless fingers through me.
Over the sprawl of the Mass and the flickering cityscape, I see Hyperion. Beyond her, a faint stain of pink that bleeds into a bruised sky littered with skyhooks and blinking satellites and the vein of starships from the AID that make their way into space.
Soon I’ll be on one of them. Not soon enough.
Lionheart’s killers, Holiday included, will be peeling Hyperion apart.
I look up as Volga trudges out onto the balcony. We came directly from our meeting with the Duke and paid cash for one of the suites at the penthouse level. They are sound-sealed and come with autonomous security systems as well as smoked glass for privacy. I reach under my armpit for the reassuring feel of my Omnivore only to grip empty leather. I’m naked without that gun.
I look back down at the city that has been my home since my mother spat me out, the youngest pup of six. I was just a government check to her. And to the government, I was just another dog for the pack. I never tricked myself into thinking my city cared about me, but I cared for it in a way I never cared for the Society. I fought to free it. I fought for it when Gold came to reclaim it. Now it changes around me. Old swallowed by new. And at the heart of the new is something I don’t understand. Some wild, frenzied clamor for power, for riches—a war of all against all.
I played along, but it wasn’t me.
The more I think about the Syndicate, the more I understand it was only natural that they would grow bored of running the petty crime of this moon. Of course they would reach for the next rung, for politics. I gave them a boost.
Why do they want the children?
I thought I could close the book on this job just like the rest. But this is different, bigger, and I can’t fool myself into shrinking it down. Cyra and Dano are dead because I pulled them into this. Not just the job with the Syndicate, but this life. I look across the deck at Volga, who has her arms barricaded around her chest like bulwarks. My only friend. She wasn’t a criminal till she met me. She was in love with the idea of the city. So many people from so many places. Then I pulled her into the shadows because I needed a guard dog. She’d be better off without me. Everyone is better off without me.
In the grip of the zoladone, the idea is served cold, wrapped pristine in logic.
Sound from the holoNews trickles from the suite’s living room out onto the balcony. A rainstorm is coming for Hyperion. The Reaper has been spotted on Mars and Obsidians are disappearing all over the Republic. There’s been no news of the kidnapping on the holos. Nothing but a blip of how a government ship went down from mechanical failure and that all on board survived.
The silence is part of the game.
The Sovereign is compromised. They have her son. But she keeps it a secret to keep Dancer and his ilk from getting the upper hand on her. So what will the Syndicate demand as ransom? That is the trillion-credit question.
“Do you regret it?” Volga asks.
“Be more specific. Selling children? No. Love that. Being mocked by a psychopathic crimelord and now hunted by sociopathic Golds? Fun stuff. Or maybe having our colleagues butchered in front of us?” Feeling the tension in my neck and bubbling in my brain, I pull out a second zoladone and roll it around in my palm. I’m about to down it to feel the sweet numbness, when Volga knocks it out of my hand and takes the dispenser off the table beside me.
“Volga, don’t be a twat.”
“No more.”
“Give me the dispenser. Volga…”
“I am tired of you walking around asleep. Tired of seeing you numb. It’s too easy for you. Feel bad, pop pill. Snort dust. Drink booze. Feel good.”
“Do I look like someone who feels good?”
“No.” Her big lips curl. “You feel nothing.”
“Give me the dispenser.”
“No.”
“Volga, you pale shit. Give me my dispenser.”
“You are not my master. Come take it if you want it,” she says with a shrug. I lunge up for it, and she pushes me to the side so I trip over one of the chairs and crash down, a blinding pain going through the old wound in my right knee. She doesn’t apologize when I crawl up from the chair.
“Give it back.”
“Fetch.” She throws it off the balcony and it spirals down into the aerial traffic beneath. I rush to the edge and watch it disappear from sight.
“You little monster,” I mutter.
Her nose flares wide. She pushes me again with her left hand, her huge strength sending me stumbling back. My cracked ribs lance with pain. I can’t breathe. She comes after me and hits me in the chest again, knocking me off my feet. I fall hard on the marble balcony, shoulder blades smacking into the stone.
“Do you feel anything now?” she asks.
“Oh, fuck…off.” I cough.
She puts a boot in my stomach and begins to push down. “Now?” With my right hand I reach into my boot to grab the stunner there. I jam it into her leg. Her skin underneath her pants crackles as it burns. She grimaces in pain, her eyes going dark as the pain summons the bloodlust hidden in her genes. “Volga…” I say. “Volga, no!” She lifts me up in a rage, easy as a pillow, and holds me with both hands, about to throw me over the edge of the balcony. I stare at the aerials hundreds of meters below.
“Do it,” I sneer. “Go on. Do it, you monster.”
The grip loosens and my world reorients as she sets me down. I sit there on the ground, breathing heavily. She collapses into the chair, almost breaking it, and stares at me with tears in her eyes. “I’m not a monster. I’m not.” She looks up at me, her eyes puffy and swollen. “But you are. They were just children.”
“You knew what we were trying to do,” I say, rubbing my ribs. She definitely cracked a few more. “That someone could die. Now you cry about it because you can’t handle the guilt?” I snort. “Grow up. You did the deed. Same as me. Now go buy yourself a spine and a good fuck with all that blood money. Jove knows you need both.” She stares at me as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing. I don’t know what else she expected. The deed’s done. Time to move on. “Why’d you even go along with it if your panties were in such a bunch?”
“I did it for you!” she says in a pitiful voice. “I did it because you needed me. I’ve always needed you. You brought me here. You’re my family. And I’ve never been able to do anything for you. Every time I try, you get angry. ‘Go home, Volga. Fuck off, Volga.’ But here. This. It was something I could do to help. I could have your back, like you have mine. I did not know it would be so hard.”
She sits there trying to stop crying. Her huge shoulders heave up and down.
I don’t know what to do. “Just think of the new adventures we are about to begin,” I say distantly. “A tour of Africa. The seafood. The animals. The whores of the Barbary Coast!”
She looks up with puffy eyes. “Do you think they will kill them?”
“No. They won’t kill them. You heard the Duke. No rough stuff. What use is a dead hostage? They’ll want more money or something, I guess. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s not our business.”
“Not our business? We’re a part of this, Ephraim. Part of the Republic.”
“Why? ’Cause we live here? That’s the sort of shit they want you to think so you go along thinking you got skin in the game. It’s all a scam, princess. You’re never fighting for yourself. You’re always fighting for them. Lune, Augustus, Reaper, what’s the damn difference?”
“Why are you like this?”
“Like what?”
“Evil.”
I sigh. “I’m not evil.”
“Then what are you?”
“Self-aware. You can’t take care of anyone. That’s not how it works. All you can do is take care of yourself. No one else is going to.”
“I would take care of you.”
I roll my eyes. “You think those children care about you? You think they would grow up into people who would care about you? To them, you’re just a weapon.”
“And what am I to you?” Volga asks. “If I was not a weapon, you would not keep me with you.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t keep you around for the conversation.”
By the look in her eyes, I know I’ve finally gone too far.
Something breaks. Something important. “Volga.” My hand reaches out halfheartedly like she’s falling as she takes a step back from me. But then I lower my hand, and she sees me lower it, and she turns and walks away. The door to the suite slams and she’s gone, and I know deep down under the cool tide of the zoladone that this is how our story together ends.
Alone again. And better for it.
I leave the hotel room soon after Volga has gone. I don’t go back to my spot, fearing Republic Intelligence or maybe Gorgo might pay a visit. Instead, I find myself in the street outside Cyra’s apartment, staring up at the glass building that billows up into the sky like a piece of string on the end of an airduct. I wanted to see where Cyra lived. I don’t know why. Maybe for closure. To see how she lived so I can understand why she put a dagger in my back; but I can’t go inside. There’s retinal scanners in the lobby, and the building has private guards.
So I stand on the street as the rain falls, looking up at the building, wondering which glass window Cyra looked out and will never look out again, and realizing I never understood who she was, not really. Not her. Not Dano. Because I kept them on the street looking in, and they returned the favor in kind.
I walk the streets, passing through steam coming up out of the sewers, through a forest of noodle vendors and fleshtech salesmen, all calling to passersby. They transmit a kaleidoscope of sex advertisements from holo broadcasters perched on their shoulders like metal gargoyles. I walk the old route Trigg and I used to take from the Promenade, past the Gravity Gardens, all the way south to seedy Old Town. I outstrip the path we walked together and continue into the early hours of the morning, long enough to witness the changing of the guard from the nocturnal men to those of the day. All of it bathed in the hazy pink of the long sunrise.
As the city wakes, I eat a breakfast of doughy cinnamon noodles and coffee at one of my favorite old stands on the edge of the wharf, and feed the seagulls like Trigg used to. Below, in the water of the Sea of Serenity, large scrubbing robots collect litter. Afterwards, I catch a cab to my storage unit. In one of the private rooms, another slender robot with forklift arms sets the metal box onto the table and leaves me. In the box are my ready bags. Two of them, both slick black leather. I’m surprised how much it depresses me thinking this is all I have of my life. A thief with nothing worth packing. Sounds like a bad joke. Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for. A chance to start clean. I’ve got nothing aside from stacks of hard plastic currency in the bags, IDs, several DNA sleeves, two suits, the two pistols, and a stash of backup zoladone pills. I pocket those, but I don’t take one yet. Save it for the ride.
I take a cab to the private aerial skyhook, a floating star-shaped port for the rich and famous three kilometers above the city. It’s suspended there on gravLifts, room enough for ten private yachts to dock. It’s offensively expensive chartering a private ship, but I need to be armed, so commercial is out of the question. I’m deposited on the top level of the skyhook at the reception level. The taxi takes off the concrete runway and dips back down into the flow of terrestrial traffic, leaving me in a parklike expanse above the clouds. A fashionable Pink stands behind a reception desk in a white uniform with a tilted cap on her head and a fur coat. I shiver in the thin air.
“Good afternoon, citizen. Welcome to Zephyrus Trans-Terrestrial. Will you be checking in for your flight today?”
In my pocket, I slip one of the transparent DNA sleeves over my finger. I pretend to lick the finger and I swipe it through her sampler. “Ah, Mr. Garabaldi.” She smiles obligingly as her computer registers one of my false IDs. “We’re so pleased to have you today. The Eurydice Wind will be ready to receive you in thirty minutes. Your pilots are performing preflight checks.”
“Am I the first passenger to arrive?”
She references the manifest. “Yes, Ms. Bjorl has not yet arrived.”
“Notify me when she does.”
“Of course. You may depart whenever you like after the preflight checks have been performed, but we welcome you to enjoy our worlds-famous services in the terminal until then.” She pushes me a holoMap from her datapad. Mine catches it. “You’ll see that we have two spas, a saltwater pool, alt reality pods, massage and pleasure staff on hand. We also have a game room, two lounges—the twilight and the sky….”
I follow a bellhop who takes my bags to the well-appointed bar. A man plays a piano in the corner of the sunrise-washed room. I sit on the crème leather, my back to the windowbanks of clouds and eerie pink sky, my eyes on the door, waiting for Volga’s immense bulk to fill it. Other passengers come and go. Most are Gold and Silver, and their conversations tinkle like spoons on rare china. Some are actresses I recognize, and one or two famous racers. Soon it sounds like the buzzing of gnats to my ears, claustrophobic, irritating. The cramps from zoladone withdrawal are starting. Still I don’t take one.
After my third drink, Volga hasn’t arrived. I retire to the ship, where I meet the Blue captain and flight crew and settle my bags in the sleeping quarters. The flight stewardess makes me a vodka litchi and I wait for Volga in the ship’s lounge. An hour. Then two more.
By midday, I finally digest the fact that Volga is not coming. A loneliness settles in me. Not a pang, to which I’m accustomed, but the deep loneliness of knowing that this is it. This is the bottom. A two-bag life for one. The end of a friendship, set to the sound of the droning holoNews and the slam of a door. My newest vodka litchi seems suddenly very tasteless. The gravity in the cabin eerily absent. When booking, I had asked the captain to put on null grav for the preflight. I did that for Volga. It was something she missed from our first flight from Earth to Luna. No point to it now. I’ve always hated the feeling of space. I ask the stewardess to kill the null grav and tell her that I’m ready to depart. Ms. Bjorl isn’t coming.
I head to the lavatory to relieve myself before the main engine ignition. I take antinausea medication and am about to go back to the lounge when I remember I should alter my destination now that Volga isn’t coming, in case her conscience gets the better of her and she goes to the authorities. Goodbye, Africa; hello, Echo City. I climb the stairs to the flight deck. It’s empty. Quiet. The flight crew that had been preparing me a meal in the kitchen is gone. I check their small bunkrooms. Nothing. This isn’t good. I creep past the kitchen toward the cockpit and peer inside. The pilots are gone too. Nothing seems amiss out the cockpit viewports. The landing pad is deserted and it’s clear sky beyond that. Still, something is wrong. I pull my snub-nosed pistol from under my armpit.
Have the Syndicate come back to finish me after all?
I move through the hall. The gun is slippery in my sweaty palms. I clear the top level and look down the flight of stairs, listening for movement. Hearing nothing, I creep down the stairs.
In the lounge I hear something. Voices. Volga? I burst into the lounge with my pistol out in front to find two women staring at me from the leather flight chairs. “Holiday…” The word sticks in my throat like a shattered chicken bone. She sits with her elbows on her knees, in civi clothes. Black pants, boots, and a hunter-green leather jacket that looks like it’s got some sort of concealed pulseShield generator sewn into the fabric of the left sleeve. A heavy railgun pistol is strapped into the holster on her right thigh. Woman is ready for urban warfare. And at her side, in new clothes and freshly washed hair, sits the rabbit, with blinding hate in her rusty eyes. Her arm’s in a sling. “Ah. Shit…”
“Sit down, Ephraim,” Holiday says.
I keep the gun on them and look down the hall for others they might have brought with them. They seem alone, but there’s likely a squad of lurcher commandos waiting just inside the terminal. It’s over. I laugh bitterly and point a finger at Lyria. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“That’d be easier for you, wouldn’t it?”
“How did you get past the Obsidians?”
She makes a face at me. “Magic.”
I grunt. “How did you find me?”
“We are the State,” Holiday says. “How long did you think you could hide?”
“Longer than a day,” I admit. “Do you mind if I make myself a drink? Or four?” I ease toward the wet bar.
“Shut up and sit down.”
I frown and look at my pistol. “I’m the one with the gun.”
“I’m the one with a Stained in the cargo hold.”
“Talk about overkill.” I slump into the seat across from hers. I’m surprised to notice that I don’t feel defeat or fear. If anything, I feel relief. I engage the safety and put my gun on the table between us, pushing it toward Lyria.
“You’ll probably want to use that.”
“Already got one,” she says, pulling my Omnivore from her jacket and setting it on her knee. There’s a fingerlock around the trigger. I smile in seeing it again.
“Escaped the Obsidians. Somehow prevented yourself from being skinned alive by Republic Intelligence. Now sitting here with a gun. Must be magic.”
“Ephraim…” Lyria starts.
“Call me Philippe, if that makes you more comfortable.”
“Slag you.”
“Original.” I lean back and cross my legs. “So, what happens now? Commandos burst in and drag me to an interrogation tank? Peel off parts of me to give to the Reaper when he gets home? Or will it be chemical torture? Experiential? Lock me in a holoimmersion for a relative century? Or do I have a one-way subaquatic ticket to Deepgrave?”
“This is the part where you tell us where the children are,” Holiday says. “Then you tell us who you sold them to. What you know about the Pink with the cane. And how we can get them back. For your sake, I hope you know enough to spare yourself being booked for treason.”
“Fortunately, capital punishment is no longer an option,” I say.
“We might make an exception.”
“How noble.”
She leans forward. “You’re gonna have to get used to the idea that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cell, Ephraim. How big that cell is depends on what you tell me.”
“Holiday, you’ve spent too much time in the military. You can’t go at a man like that. Give him no means of escape. No incentive. Remember the Eleventh Legion? You were there. The Golden Basilisks.” She remembers. “What happens if you surround an enemy force with no path of surrender or retreat? They fight to the death. And that’s not good for anyone. Trapped by that dam, weren’t they? Do you remember how we just kept firing into them? Eight hours to kill fifty thousand men because we didn’t want to break the dam with bombs. Who knew it could take so long? I never saw the Reaper’s face after that. But you must have. Did he like it?”
“This isn’t a game, Ephraim,” she says. “If you hate life so much you want to die, then be my guest. I’ll give you the bullet to eat. But don’t take two innocent kids with you.”
“Innocent? Everyone keeps throwing that shit around. Their parents put them on the board. They didn’t have to attend functions of state. They didn’t have to parade them around like the paragons of progress. But they did. They made them the targets, not me. How many little kids do you think died in the Battle of Luna? I saw whole blocks disintegrated by Valii-Rath particle beams. Schools turned to dust by termite munitions with Republic stamps on them. Dead kids are the loose change of war. Don’t come whining to me because the man and woman who started this don’t want to pay out of their own pocket like the rest of us.”
I’ve never seen her look at me with so much disgust. “What happened to you?”
“Life. Same shit that happens to everyone else.”
“Trigg would spit on you if he could see this.”
“Well, he died on your watch. Not mine.”
Holiday looks blankly at me as if I’ve slapped her across the face.
All the days we met on Trigg’s birthday, that truth hung between us, unspoken like some weapon of mutually assured destruction. And now that I say it, I taste ashes in my mouth. To use Trigg like this, as a weapon, is the ultimate perversion of who he was, what he meant to the both of us. But he followed her everywhere. And she led him to his death for a cause that doesn’t even remember his name. Holiday can’t meet my eyes. But Lyria shakes her head.
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Save the speeches, love. You’re just a little girl who thinks she’s a hero. You don’t know a thing about me.”
“You’re right. I don’t,” she says. “You’ve gone hard to make that clear. But I know my ma died of cancer in the mines. Ate her lungs right up. Pa thought it was his fault. That he couldn’t get her the right meds. Saw it squeeze the life outta him. And by the time we got out of the mines, he was already dead. All he saw—the sky, the world—he hated, because she didn’t get to see it. You think she would have wanted that for the man she loved?”
“Never been a slave. Wouldn’t know.”
“We were promised everything when they brought us up; then I lost my family. My whole family. You can whine about your nicks and scrapes, but you got no idea what that’s like. Should I turn nasty because I saw evil done to them? Should I blame the worlds? I blamed myself. I blamed the Sovereign. And what luck did that get me?” She clears her throat, emotion welling. “You asked me if I believe in the Vale. I don’t know. I don’t know if it exists or if they watch me. But I know it doesn’t matter if they can see us. What matters is that we can feel them. Remember them. And try to live to be as good as we were in their eyes.”
I look away from her to the window where pink clouds twirl.
“Trigg might be gone, yeah. I know you feel robbed. But you gotta remember that he saw something to love in you, even if you can’t see it. He saw you as a good man, Ephraim. So if you ever loved him, be a good man.”
“That man never even existed. It was just something Trigg made up to make himself feel better.”
“Then why did you not kill me in the shuttle?”
“I did. I pulled the trigger. The safety was on. It was just luck.”
“You could have pulled the trigger again. But you didn’t. You let me live.”
“And look what happened.”
“This man you’re playing at. You sure he’s not the one you made up to make yourself feel less?”
I feel everything now. As I stare out the window at the ships bound for orbit, I see Trigg in the waters of the Aegean Sea when we took our first vacation during his leave. I remember him playing his little guitar in the hammock behind our bungalow. He sounded terrible but I loved watching the sweat beading on his temples, the freckles on his shoulders, the childish laugh in a man the world kept trying to make hard. He was patient with me. Slowly breaking down the walls that had stood tall since my mother looked at me and said she loved me for the thousand credits a month. He proposed on that vacation.
All the good memories of him have been held hostage by the horror of his exit. Now the bars crack, the doors open, and they flood me. All I want is to say goodbye to him. To let him know he was mine and I was his. But sitting here, surrounded by the ruinous shit I’ve made, I still can’t feel anything but anger.
I look at Holiday and I don’t have anything to say. I can’t apologize. The words just won’t come out; just as she will never apologize for letting him die, not even to herself. But she sees the animal pain in me.
“He would have wanted you to fix this,” she says.
“I don’t know where they are,” I say.
Holiday’s more comfortable talking about the kidnapping than she is about Trigg. “Who was it?”
“Syndicate. My contact was the Duke of Hands.”
She already knew. “Could you identify him?”
“Yeah. But I doubt he’s in the census. He was a Rose. High, high end. Private stock of a loaded Gold. Start your search there. And there was an Obsidian named Gorgo, definitely military. Not fresh from the Ice.” She takes notes. “What’s your exposure, Holiday? What could they want?”
“You tell me. There’s been no proof of life. No demands.”
“They didn’t kill them,” I say. “The Duke said they were for the Queen.”
“Did you meet her?” Holiday asks.
“No. Word in the game is that she’s an Obsidian warlord from Earth. No one knows for sure.”
“Really?” Holiday frowns. “Republic Intelligence has been operating under the assumption that she’s a Red for more than a year now.”
“A Red?” Lyria whispers.
“You think Obsidians would follow a Red?” I laugh.
“There’s also a chance they’re working with the Society,” Holiday says.
“That seems unlikely.”
“Why?”
“The Duke was a slave. He loathes the slavers. If he’s working for the Ash Lord, he doesn’t know it. Is this about the Peace?”
“Maybe.” Holiday looks out the window nervously, or as nervous as a woman with a head like a cinder block can look.
“Expecting someone?”
“You should tell him,” Lyria says. “He’s got the right to know.”
“Know what?” I lean forward. “Know what?”
“We aren’t the only ones looking for the children….”
“Slag me.” I half stand from my seat. “He’s back? The Reaper?” I look out the window, feeling the color drain from my face. “Ares?”
“Worse,” Holiday says. “The Lady Julii is on the hunt. And she’s out for blood.”
“She’s eight months pregnant. Forgive me if I don’t shake in my boots.”
Holiday smiles. “She attacked an Augustan shuttle over Hyperion in full war armor because Lyria was inside.”
I stare at her. “I didn’t know they made maternity armor.”
“They do.”
“Does she know it’s the Syndicate?”
Holiday shrugs. “We don’t know what she knows. And she’s not sharing information. We caught some of her investigators breaking into the crash site.”
I scratch my head. Fingers are getting itchy for a burner, stomach knotted for more zoladone. “Well, if that woman declares war on the Syndicate, the kids are as good as chopped. They’ll start sending body parts to the Citadel in thorn-wrapped boxes.”
“Which is why we are here and Republic Intelligence is not,” Holiday says. “You know the Syndicate better than we do. We need you to come in and help coordinate the rescue effort.”
“Not a chance. They have people in your government.”
Holiday squints. “How do you know that?”
“We were given the boy’s itinerary more than a month in advance. But they didn’t volunteer any other insiders. Prolly didn’t want to burn them. Which is why I had to recruit you….” I look at Lyria. “If they know I’m helping you…”
“Body parts,” Lyria says.
“If we’re compromised, then you’ll have to retrieve them,” Holiday says.
I snort a laugh. “Fuck that.”
“Thought you’d say that. I know you don’t care about your life, Ephraim. But something tells me you care about hers.” She sets a holocube down on the table and an image of a cell appears with a woman hunched on a bench with her head in her hands. It’s Volga.
“We found her at the Cerebian Zoo,” Holiday says. “She was easier to find than you were. What wasn’t easy was keeping the Telemanuses from killing her on sight.”
“If you touch a hair on her head…”
“No. It’s your turn to listen. Your turn to obey. If you do not do everything I ask, then I will give her to the Telemanuses.” Lyria looks as surprised as I am.
“Don’t hurt her,” I say.
Holiday leans back. “So there is someone in there.”
“She didn’t want to do it.”
“I don’t care. You will bring me the children. Then you can have your friend back.” She stares back at me without remorse. “This is the game you decided to play.”
I look back at the holo and wonder how I ever could have been cruel to Volga. She followed me like a puppy from the day we met. All she gave me was love. She never even asked for it in return. Since she was born she’s been a slave, a monster. Kicked down by everyone. Then she found me and I treated her just the same. I feel sick.
“There’s a way,” I say. “But I want a pardon for me and Volga.”
“A pardon? After what you’ve done?”
“I want it in digital with a third-party negotiator.”
“No pardon for the rest of your crew?” Lyria asks.
“They’re dead. Why do you think I’m even talking to you?” So much for my code.
“What do you think, my liege?” Holiday says as she looks at me. She tilts her head. “She wants to speak with you.” Holiday touches her datapad and the face of the Sovereign appears in front of me. Her eyes are a pure liquid gold that have seen fleets burning off the shoulder of moons and war criminals walk free on her warrant. I hate her without measure.
“Ephraim ti Horn.”
“Lionheart.” The informality irritates Holiday. “I want Volga released immediately.”
“No.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“She will be released when I have the children back. I will have a binding agreement drawn up via the Ophion Guild.”
“Amani,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“Ophion is in the pocket of the Syndicate. You go there with a contract for me, we have a problem. Use Amani.” It’s a very strange thing telling the most powerful woman in the worlds something she doesn’t know. “And I want Volga to be pardoned on the event of my death.”
“No.”
“We both know how much you like handing out pardons. I know I’m not a Gold rapist or mass murderer, but in the spirit of the Amnesty, surely you can find it in your heart to forgive.”
“Do you want to die, Mr. Horn?”
“Irrelevant. Volga deserves life.”
She’s not pleased by my intransigence. Tough shit. “The man she shot was like a father to me. He’s still fighting for his life.”
“Then I certainly hope you don’t lose a father and a child on the same day.”
She doesn’t react. Her Gold calm is so perfectly preserved and haughty that I want to reach through the holo and throttle her. “Very well,” she says. “Holiday will fit you with a transponder. When you locate the Syndicate base, you will signal with this transponder, and a strike team will arrive at your coordinates.”
“The Syndicate will check for a transponder.”
“It will be hidden.”
“And they’ll find it. Subdermal, isotope, they’ll find it. These aren’t street thugs. You might have noticed.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“Give me a pad number, and I’ll call it. Then your killsquad can track its GPS and fly in and murder everyone in whatever way gets you off.”
She doesn’t like it, but neither of us has much of a choice. “Very well, Mr. Horn. You have a deal. But I would like you to know one thing. If you attempt to escape, or if you defect to the Syndicate, know this as a certain fact: your friend will die. And be it on Mars, Luna, Earth, the Rim, or Venus itself, one night you will wake in the middle of the dark and find a shadow standing over you. If you are lucky, it will be me. If you are unlucky, it will be Sevro or my husband, and you will die shitting yourself in a foreign bed.”