I’m not noticing, I told myself.
You seem to be noticing quite a bit, Max thought.
Stop eavesdropping.
I can’t help it if you yell your thoughts.
That was better left unanswered.
Jak and I stood side by side, watching the gamblers in his casino lose money.
“You staying?” Jak asked.
“Not tonight.” I glanced at him. “Come with?”
“Can’t.” He shrugged one shoulder toward the main floor. “Busy.”
I hid my disappointment.
He considered me. “Why you break into my establishment, eh Bhaaj?”
“What?” I asked, all innocence. “Can’t just visit?”
He snorted. “Know you.”
He knew me far too well, but I had no intention of admitting it.
“What you need?” he asked.
“Looking for someone,” I admitted.
“They trouble?”
“Killer.”
His shoulders stiffened. “The war is over. No more killing.”
“Not for this one.”
“Why? She a drug punker?”
He spoke with no outward sign of emotion, but I recognized his tells, the barest twitch of his lips, that tightening of his muscles. His question touched a raw place for both of us. In our youth, Jak and I had run in a dust gang with a girl named Dig who liked to fight even more than me, and also an electronics genius who called himself Gourd. We had laughed and rumbled together, ready to take on the universe. They were my family, Dig like a sister, Gourd like a brother, and Jak—well, Jak. My feelings there were better left alone. I couldn’t risk the vulnerability of pondering my tangled emotions when it came to Jak. They took more out of me than I knew how to give.
The four of us had walked different paths to adulthood. I left Raylicon in army, Jak started his casino, and Gourd engineered filtration machines that purified the water in underground springs, helping our people survive.
Dig became a drug boss.
Dig Kajada had led a cartel that inflicted gods only knew how much pain on the Undercity. She and the other cartel boss, Hammer Vakaar, had started the cartel war. They both died as a result, but we had lost Dig long before that day. Now we were three, Jak, me, and Gourd, and too much pain lay in that knowledge.
I just said, “This killer not a drug punker. Offworlder.”
“Why you want to find her?”
“Private.”
He nodded. “Ken.”
Good. That meant he’d reveal nothing I told him. Majda would incinerate me for talking to the Undercity’s king of vice, but Majda didn’t have to know. They hired me because I knew paths hidden from them, places where they could never walk.
“ISC wants me to find her.” I didn’t mention the Ruby Pharaoh. Some lines even I didn’t cross. “Killer came here. Vanished.” Like the sea.
He waved his hand as if to encompass the planet. “ISC has all sorts of searching shit. Could find a speck-mite under four tons of rock.”
I shrugged. “Killer has good shrouds.”
“Not that good.”
“Yah. That good.”
Jak snorted. “Only a fucking Jagernaut has got shrouds that good.”
“Yah.”
He froze with that sudden silence I knew so well, like a wild animal that hid by becoming so still, he turned into part of the surroundings. “Jagernauts always kill.”
I shook my head. “In war. Not murdering innocent civilians.”
He stared at me. “Murder? Why?”
“No one knows.”
He stood watching my face, his dark gaze so intent, it could have scalded someone who didn’t know him so well. “Whisper mill is always full of rumors,” he said flatly. “None about a killing machine disguised as a human being.”
I hadn’t known he saw Jagernauts that way. “Human. Not machine.”
“Machine. Got too much biomech.”
I scowled at him. “I got biomech. That make me a machine?”
He smiled, just a hint of that radiant grin. “Makes you better. Faster. Stronger. Stranger, too.”
“Not strange,” I growled.
“Strange as all hell, Bhaaj.” He touched my cheek. “I like.”
I turned my head and kissed the palm of his hand.
“Come back later.” His lashes lowered partway over those wickedly sensuous eyes of his. “I hear any whispers about jags, I’ll say.”
Well, hell, how could I resist that look? So maybe I could be less busy.
“Yah,” I murmured. “Later is good.”
The molten radiance of the setting sun filled my penthouse. I slouched on the sofa in front of the window-wall. No lamps lit the room, only the bronzed light flowing in from the sunset.
“Forbidden light,” I murmured. “Cruel magic, burning the sky.” The words came from an Undercity poem written so long ago that nothing remained except that one line. We lived in the dark, forever denied the sky. Our history had formed in a time so ancient, we had no longer remembered why our ancestors had withdrawn to live under the city—not until last year.
Our discoveries started with a simple bargain; my people would let the army test them for Kyle abilities in return for a free meal at the Rec Center. A small thing, really. It came about after I discovered a dealer was addicting Undercity kids to phorine, a drug that only acted on psions, also called Kyle operators. No one expected to find much with the tests. The incidence of empaths in the general population was one tenth of a percent, and telepaths were less than one in a million. Testing a few people from the aqueducts wouldn’t be enough to find any true Kyle talents, but the scientists could check our DNA to see if we carried a higher incidence of the recessive Kyle genes. I’d worried that none of my people trusted me enough to come for testing. Back then, I was an unknown to them, partway between the Undercity and Cries. Still, I hoped a few might come.
Four hundred people had followed me out of the Undercity that day.
That great act of trust had stunned me. We learned a truth no one had dreamed. Thirty percent of us were empaths. Five percent were telepaths, a rate fifty-thousand times greater than in normal human populations. Had my ancestors retreated into the dark six thousand years ago because they couldn’t take the crushing mental pressure of human contact? For millennia we had lived under the city, until my people became so inbred, birth defects were as common as our poverty. And while we died in the darkness, we created a miracle.
Cries had ignored us. We were the dirt under their gleaming city. The police thought a few homeless people and drug dealers lived in the ruins. They had no real idea of our culture until that day when four hundred of us walked out of the darkness. One hundred and sixteen empaths. Twenty telepaths. No one knew how many more remained hidden beneath the city, some so far down, they couldn’t bear any light, neither the sun nor the relentless glare of other minds. Now, suddenly, we had value, not only to the power in the City of Cries, but to the entire Imperialate—and I’d be damned if I let anyone take advantage of that gift in my people.
I pushed off the couch, restless. I needed to stop thinking about psions and do my job. Except this time I couldn’t separate my brooding about psions from my work. I had to find out why this telepathic Jagernaut went berserk and came to Raylicon. I walked to the window wall. Shadows cloaked the land outside as the sun slipped behind the horizon, like a rim of liquid gold on the edge of the world. Given the eighty-hour days, the sunsets seemed to take forever. It never stopped affecting me. I barely knew the cycle of days on my own world. I had been fifteen when I first saw the sky of Raylicon. The army had shipped me offworld not long after I enlisted, and I learned to live in the light of other worlds. To me, days here seemed endless—yet they also felt genuine, as if they spoke to an identity deep within my genes.
I pressed my palms against the glass, and the aged sunlight spilled across my skin. I was the person that everyone expected to negotiate for my people, now that we knew our value to the po
wers of Skolia. Major Bhaajan, the supposed winner who made it out of the slums, the anomaly who could deal with the Imperialate. And I was the worst possible choice, whether to negotiate for psions, meet with the Abaj, or deal with an insane Jagernaut, for I had no Kyle ability, nothing of that soul crushing “gift” my people carried.
What General Vaj Majda had said last year, that meant nothing:
“The tests didn’t say you have no Kyle traits,” she told me. “They said you didn’t manifest any.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.
“If the testers had been certain you had no ability, they would have given you a rating of zero. They didn’t give you any rating at all.”
I hadn’t wanted to hear it. “The traits always show up in the tests.”
“Usually.” Lavinda had an odd look, as if she grieved. “Unless you repressed them so deeply, you no longer feel any trace of your gifts.”
I stiffened. “Why would I do that?”
She spoke softly. “To protect your mind from a life that was killing everyone around you.”
She was wrong. She had to be. I couldn’t be a psion.
It would destroy me.
IV
The Hidden Paths
I drummed my fingers on the bar. Abstract holos swirled above its glossy black surface, their violet colors so dark, they were no more than a shimmer in the air. They reflected off my glass and turned the whiskey inside a dark gold.
“Blasted meds,” I grumbled. “Can’t get drunk.” The nanomeds in my body not only repaired damage to my cells, they also deactivated the chemicals that caused inebriation.
Dara, the bartender, didn’t look the least sympathetic. Well, so. She had reason. Most people in the Undercity had no health meds at all, let alone the top military issue I carried. She stood across the bar, bathed in glimmering violet holos while she polished an empty glass. Purple eye shadow surrounded her eyes. Her silvery jumpsuit left her arms, shoulders, and hardened abs bare, and gleamed with reflected holos. It was hard to believe this glistening creature was the same harried woman who spent her days looking after the family she supported with her job here at the Black Mark.
“You want to get drunk,” Dara said, “tell your meds.”
Sure, I could reprogram my biomech web so it stopped countering the alcohol. As much as I might enjoy the release, though, I needed my wits about me in this job.
“Maybe later,” I said.
Dara laughed. “Least I don’t got to cut you off, eh Bhaaj?”
“Couldn’t, you know.”
“Sure I could.” She set down the tumbler. “But you need a good drunk.”
“Eh.” She had a point.
The casino was dark except for displays that shimmered, glittered, and sparkled, mesmerizing the clientele. I couldn’t “enjoy” that effect, either. My military training included techniques that made me resistant to suggestion. Most times, it was an advantage, but sometimes I wished I could be like everyone else. That never lasted long, though. Life here would soon remind me why I had wanted to escape the Undercity—as it had last year when I found a newborn baby with its dead mother and her terrified five-year-old son alone in a cave.
“The little ones?” I asked. “Doing well?” Dara had taken in both the baby and the five-year-old.
Dara relaxed out of her bartender persona. “Baby starting to talk. Babble, mostly.” Affection softened her voice. “Good talk, eh? Smarter than adults.”
I chuckled. “Yah, could be.”
A voice rumbled at my side. “You distracting my staff?”
Startled, I looked around. Jak was leaning his sexy self against the bar next to my stool.
“Least you didn’t break in this time,” he added.
I smiled, thinking of some private rooms here I’d be happy to break in with him.
He touched my lips. “Should do more often.”
“What, breaking and entering?”
He spoke in a low voice. “No. Smile.”
“I’d scare off the customers.”
He glanced at Dara. “She that scary?”
“Terrifying,” Dara said. She looked about as terrified as a bread roll.
The barest trace of a smile touched his lips, just a hint of the dazzle. He mostly had a closed look, though, not withdrawn exactly, more like he had secrets.
“What’s going?” I asked.
“Come with,” he said.
“Yah, so.” I nodded to Dara and she nodded back.
Jak and I walked through the casino. The glitterati of Cries were out in force tonight, slumming in Jak’s den of vice, gambling or withdrawing to secluded rooms for more private activities. It was the only time anyone from Cries ventured into the Undercity, and Jak had to invite them. No invitation, no casino. Period. You couldn’t find his elusive establishment unless he let you. To keep his secrets, he often packed up the place and moved.
Gambling ranked as a major crime in the City of Cries. Lovely, place, Cries. Everything was illegal. Shit, if you took a breath the wrong way, off to jail you’d go. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it felt that way. Jak’s customers were opening themselves to blackmail if they uttered a word about their sins, so they kept their silence about his casino and in return he protected their secrets. He hired his staff only among our people, he paid good wages, and he looked after their circles of kin and kith. His protected his own. In return, they gave him a loyalty that had become legendary in the aqueducts.
No one besides Jak’s customers came from Cries to the Undercity. Not that these city types realized that truth. After all, every year thousands of people visited the Concourse, which formed the top level of the Undercity. Visitors considered it part of the “dangerous slum” where my people lived. Yah, right, those privileged types were risking their lives by shopping at all those menacing boutiques and cafes. Located just barely below ground level, the Concourse was a tourist trap. Anyone could visit it except people who actually came from the Undercity. The cops chased them out. Couldn’t have the trendy, shiny Concourse ruined by the appearance of the actual people who supposedly lived there.
Jak was watching me. “Pissed?”
I let out a breath, trying to ease my anger. “Dara’s husband. No license.”
His forehead creased with his puzzlement. “No what?”
I switched into Cries speech, frustrated with my inability to express what I wanted to say in the Undercity dialect. “We’re trying to get him a vendor’s license for the Concourse, so he can set up a stall and sell his tapestries up there.”
“Never happen. Not for us.”
“That’s the problem.” I stalked past the gambling tables. “Dara’s husband is brilliant. He has no idea. The city elite would pay a fortune for his sculptures or those tapestries he weaves. His work is better than anything I’ve seen on the Concourse, and it’s genuine undercity work, not some cheap knock off. But the damn licensing bureau in Cries keeps blocking the approval for his license.”
“An Undercity vendor selling on the Concourse?” Jak shook his head. “Sounds sacrilegious.”
“Yah, well, that needs to change.”
“You won’t see an Undercity stall on the Concourse.”
“Not a stall.” I reached the bottom of the metal stairs that spiraled up to the balcony above. Swinging around to Jak, I said, “We’ll get him a boutique near the top, where he can sell outrageously priced goods.”
Jak stopped and met my gaze. “Never happen.”
“Don’t bet on it.” I turned and headed up the stairs. Jak came with me, neither of us speaking.
You just wait, I thought.
Was that directed at me? Max asked. What am I supposed to wait for?
Not you, I thought. Cries.
That makes even less sense.
Seriously, Max? He knew exactly what I meant. I wondered if everyone’s EI gave them a hard time just to amuse themselves. Maybe being an EI got boring.
Sometimes, Max thought. I find
ways to occupy my processors. Your friend Jak should be glad I don’t gamble here. I could beat even his unethically rigged games.
Stay out of it. I’d known Jak all my life, practically since my earliest memories, and we’d fought a lot over the decades, when we weren’t making love, but we never talked about certain areas of our lives, like how he felt about my leaving Cries or how I felt about his being one of the lead crime bosses here. That path could only end in anger, with words spoken that we could never take back.
We fell silent as we climbed the stairs. At the top, we walked down a hall filled with holo-stars.
I decided to break the ice. “Pretty holos.”
“For you,” Jak told me.
I snorted. “Don’t think so. Always this way.”
He gave me his wicked grin. “Yah, but could it be for you.”
Ah, gods, if he did that again, I’d pull him down right here in the hallway. I took his hand.
Jak squinted at me. “What doing, grabbing my fingers?”
For flaming sake. “I’m being romantic, ox-brain.”
He laughed, a deep rumble. “Real romantic, Bhaajo, calling me an ox-brain.”
Only he could get away with calling me Bhaajo. “How’s this?” I nudged him against the wall. We stood eye to eye, his look more intoxicating than whiskey. A woman could lose herself in that gaze. We kissed, his lips warm, his embrace muscular. I’d never found a man who did it for me like Jak. We never admitted why we kept coming together, but that didn’t stop it from happening anymore than the proverbial salmon on Earth could stop themselves from swimming upstream to mate. No, forget that comparison; salmon ended up killing themselves in the process. I shut off my mind and just enjoyed the pleasures of my disreputable kingpin.
Someone cleared her throat.
Well, shit. Jak and I turned to look. Pat Oey Sandjan stood a few meters away, surrounded by lazily swirling holographic stars while she looked excruciatingly uncomfortable.
“Uh, sorry,” she said.
Jak and I stepped apart. “Not a problem,” I said.
“It’s not?” Jak muttered.
“Got intruder,” Sandjan said. “Down a ways. Three levels below the Concourse.”