The Sovereign wheels on Holiday. “Where are the Watchmen?”
“In holding.”
“Send a team to the checkpoint. Now. Tell them to turn the place upside down.”
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“We weren’t given a gun.”
“I told them it was his.”
“Well, they didn’t tell us,” Holiday says.
The Lionguard teams arrive at the checkpoint by air. We watch via their helmet holoCams as they search the building. They find the pistol stored in a boot bag at the bottom of a Watchman’s locker. “That’s a Vulcan Omnivore,” Holiday says distantly. “They only made one line of them about sixty years back. It’s a collector’s item. Worth tens of thousands. One of them must have nipped it to sell.”
I’m a second behind the Sovereign in noticing the strange tone in Holiday’s voice.
“Running forensics,” one of the Lionguards says over his com. A holo of the gun appears in the center of the Sovereign’s conference table. My fingerprints show up on the barrel, trigger, and hilt. But a second set from larger fingers stands out on the battery pack.
“Filtering through the Index,” Holiday says in a dead pitch. “Match found. Piraeus Insurance company register 741 PCE.” She swallows. “Ephraim ti Horn, claims investigator.” The swarthy face of a man in his thirties appears in the air. His eyes are narrow and mischievous, his mouth pinched in playful derision. He’s much younger than Philippe, his nose smaller and his face thinner.
“Is this your Philippe?” Holiday asks.
“His nose is smaller. His cheeks are different.”
“He might have worn prosthetics.”
I lean forward toward the holo as she plays an interview clip from his personnel file. The man sits with his feet up on his desk, talking to the camera in a bored, Luna lilt. “…it seems the case of the missing Renoir comes down not to the cunning of a cat burglar but to a mere case of bankruptcy due to moral putrescence. This is fraud. Plain. And. Simple. I recommend denying recoupment and throw the fucker in Whitehold.”
“That’s him. That’s the bloodydamn bastard in the flesh.”
Holiday lets out a heavy, wounded sigh.
“Do you know him, Holiday?” the Sovereign asks.
The stocky woman nods and laughs a sad laugh to herself. “You could say so. He’s my brother-in-law.”
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?” Wit
h 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?