“I can see it,” Bero insisted.
“And I want to see it, too.” She flashed a warm grin at his cameras as she strode down the hall at a crisp pace, Tomas smack on her heels. “Two eyes are better than one, and all that.”
“I have four hundred and fifty external cameras.”
“Four hundred and fifty-two, then. Even better.”
Tomas snorted a laugh.
“I have already begun evasive maneuvers, should my density scans be incorrect.”
Clever ship. But she was onto his game, now, and with Biran out there, she would not let Bero get away with this. “Keep eyes on it. I still want to see it. If it is a derelict ship, as your sensors think, then we can scavenge it.”
Tomas caught up with her and gave her a sideways glance that brought back tingly thoughts her headache squashed in a hurry. No way Bero could deny her a view now.
The lab was bathed in the same low, red glow as the rest of the ship. Whatever private battle Bero was waging with the ship’s hardwired emergency systems, he was having a hard time winning. In the glow, it was easier to separate herself from the place that had become her home.
The burning ache that opened in her chest whenever she thought of Bero manipulating her into serving his needs on a cross-system suicide jaunt faded away. She made a concentrated effort not to think too hard on what those claw marks in the gasket might mean. That someone might have left them there, in the same moment Sanda was waking up in Bero’s medibay.
The smartscreen dominating the room glared down at her, a reflective black wall.
“Bero, bring up the visual.”
“Working on it.”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s just a camera feed. Turn it on.”
“The circuits have—what are you doing?”
Tomas peeled open a metal panel in the wall alongside the screen and was sorting through a series of breakers marked with Icarion terminology. “Some of these are thrown that shouldn’t be,” he said, all help and smiles. “Let me just—”
“Don’t touch those,” Bero snapped.
“Aw, c’mon. I’m a comms man. I know what I’m about.”
“You’re a spy.”
“Would make a terrible one if I didn’t understand the basics of the profession I’m impersonating, wouldn’t I?”
The woman’s mechanical voice interrupted, “Priority CamCast on channel one. Unable to display.”
Dead silence, filled only with the steady hum of Bero’s mechanics.
“That’s not possible,” she said, and meant it. There was no way Biran could send a priority cast through to an Icarion ship.
“You see?” Bero’s voice was firm. “An electrical malfunction with the alert system.”
Tomas had his hand poised above three likely switches. They shared a long look while the bloodred lights pulsed to an artificial heartbeat.
That was Biran out there. Had to be, despite the impossibility of his achieving an Icarion priority broadcast signal. Her people had been very, very busy since the Battle of Dralee, and they must have figured out a way to mimic the signal. She had a whole hell of a lot of questions she needed to ask them. Questions that had to do with the Nazca, and smartships, and RKVs.
Questions she could only ask if she broke the fragile peace aboard Bero right now. A peace that only held because Tomas had yet to flip those switches.
She took a breath, assumed the posture of command, and nodded. Tomas threw the breakers. The screen flickered, and a pale man in the livery of an Icarion general glared down at her.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
CHAPTER 41
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
IN A SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
The lights of Udon-Voodun were out. Those lights were never out. The place wasn’t the kind of establishment that ever bothered with closing. The few autocabs that moved through the streets zipped by, not pausing to let out a passenger or wait for a pickup. Unusual, in this part of the Grotta where the morning light should have brought out the honest folk of the neighborhood to start their daily hustle. It all could have been explained away, maybe traffic was rerouting the autocabs this morning, but the streetlights were out.
The streetlights of Prime cities, even in their fringe spaces, never went out. Because there were cameras in those lights, too. The watchful eye of Prime Inventive hovering over even the lowliest of their citizens. Someone had cut the lights from the network. Someone had rerouted the autocabs. Someone way more powerful than Jules had expected.
Someone who wanted her dead.
“You first,” she whispered, resting her hand over the grip of her handblaster.
“What?” Nox asked.
“Talking to myself.”
“Knock it off. We’re on op now.”
Not the type of op they usually pulled, she wanted to say, the never-ending urge to pull Nox’s leg the most normal thing in her life right now.
“Sorry,” she said instead, pulling up the text function on her pad. She sent to Arden: Hear anything?
They responded: Nothing. Which is weird.
She showed Nox the screen and he spat on the sidewalk. “It’s a trap. You know that, right?”
“Couldn’t have made it any more obvious, could they?”
“Could not indeed.”
They stood there awhile, side by side, staring at the dark building. They were down the street a little way, shadowed by a half-rotted overhang dripping off a long-abandoned alleyway establishment. Between them, the knowledge: They could walk. Right now. Scrub their wristpads, buy new idents. Take the money from the wraith sale and disappear into another Prime city. They’d end up in whatever that city’s version of the Grotta was, sure, but they’d be alive. Free to operate.
Arden and Lolla would most definitely be dead after that, though they’d probably never hear about it. They could just forget. Drink when they couldn’t. Load up on doze or wraith when they really, really couldn’t.
“Wouldn’t work,” Nox said.
“Nah. You’re too sentimental.”
He cocked his head to smile down at her, a sly crescent of yellowed teeth in the dark, then scratched at his beard. “So how do you want to handle this?”
“Walking into a trap? Don’t know. I can’t say I have a lot of experience with the situation.”
“Not what Harlan told me.”
She was instantly indignant. “That old codger will never let that go. It happened once.”
But of course he’d let it go. He was dead. She swallowed bile, swishing saliva around her mouth. She really needed to brush her teeth. And eat. And shower.
And kill the motherfuckers who killed her friend.
“Cameras are off.” She pulled the handblaster from its holster, hidden under a black denim jacket, and checked the charge. “So fuck being seen. Let’s go.”
“Guns a-blazin’. I like it.”
Nox fell into step at her left flank, a gun bigger than her forearm propped against the crook of his shoulder. She commanded her wristpad to send off a quick message to Arden: Coming in. Be ready.
They sent back a stream of expletives, so she wiped the screen and took a deep breath. No time for dealing with panic, she had to focus on what was coming next. With the lights off, the implication was that whoever was waiting for her didn’t want to be seen. They could also just be hoping Jules’d roll in stealth style with night vision on, then they’d bring the lights up and blind her before she even got the door all the way open. If that was their plan, then the joke was on them: She couldn’t afford night vision anything.
She reached the front door of Udon-Voodun and circled around to the right of the building, where a rickety set of stairs led straight up to the residences. Not a nice place to get caught out. Anyone waiting at the top had her dead to rights, so she gave up on stealth and sprinted up the steps, boots pounding to wake the dead as the metal construction screeched. She hit the top platform and shouldered the door open, breath hot in her mou
th, skin tingling with adrenaline as she swung around, sweeping the immediate area with the nozzle of the blaster, eyes straining against the dark.
“Clear.” Nox came in behind her and covered her back as she stalked down the hall, blaster out, each step she took past a closed door jittery. Any one of those could fly open at any moment. Any one.
“Hello, Jules,” a motherly voice said over the speakers in the corner of the hallway. Speakers meant only for fire and life-support alarms.
She froze. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Don’t you remember me? We spoke before.”
“Where’s Lolla?”
“Lolla? Lolla, Lolla, Lolla. Never heard of her. I only know Jules. Jules Valentine. Juliella Vicenza, as the birth record says.”
“What’s going on?” Nox hissed.
“I don’t know.” Jules dropped her voice to a whisper as she advanced down the hall. They were almost outside Arden’s door. “I think she’s stalling.”
Nox nodded. “Got ahead of themselves on the network but no guns on the ground yet.”
“Exactly.”
She stepped past Arden’s door, to the end of the hall, and peered around the last corner. All dark, but not a soul to be seen. “That’s my name,” she said to the voice in the speakers. “What do you want with me?”
“Everything, dear. Just everything. Why don’t you come by for tea?”
She squeezed the grip on the handblaster until her knuckles ached. “I will. You just tell me your name and location, and I’ll come by. We’ll have a real good time.”
“My friends are here to bring you to me. Careful, they can be a bit rough.”
“Time to go,” Nox said. He pounded on Arden’s door with the side of his arm. “Move, kid. Company is incoming.”
The door swung open and Arden Wyke filled it, their hair limp with grease, their eyes bulging like they’d seen the ghosts of everyone they’d ever pissed off. They had a rucksack thrown over one shoulder, the straps undone and flopping around. Cables protruded from their pockets, and they’d shoved on some smartglasses, the glint in the upper left lens signaling it was recording. At least they’d had the presence of mind to tug on a jacket and some boots over their pajamas.
“Turn that shit off,” she hissed into the lens and grabbed Arden by the shoulder, pushing them so that Nox led the way out with Arden in the middle. “And stay quiet. We got company incoming and I’m betting our friend in the walls is telling them everything we say.”
“And our position,” Nox muttered.
“Not a lot of options there.”
“Who the fuck are these people?” Arden whispered.
“Dead people. They just don’t know it yet,” Jules ground out.
She stopped frog-marching Arden the second they got their feet under them. Nox backtracked to the stairs trailing down the side of the building. Jules held her breath as Nox hesitated in the doorway, mentally crossing her fingers that the way hadn’t been blocked yet. After a heart-stopping count of twenty, Nox ducked back into the hallway and shook his head. The way was being watched.
“They’re covered, but—”
Jules ran her fingers across her lips like a zipper and threw a pointed glance to the speakers lining the hallway. She could see it in Nox’s face: No one could think fuck as loudly as that man. Arden shifted their weight back and forth like they needed to take a piss, then flicked up their wristpad and fired off a text so fast she barely saw their fingers move. No guarantee Big Momma didn’t have dial-in on their text frequencies, but Arden connected them all up through an app of their own making. It was worth a shot.
Arden: Through the kitchens?
Nox: Better than the shooting gallery.
Neither Jules nor Nox had ever had to make use of the back ways of Udon-Voodun, so Arden led a painful crawl forward, peeking their head around each corner like they expected to get their nose bit off. Couldn’t blame them, really. Arden liked the tech side of the business—the worming and the cracking, or whatever it was the nerds did to get the goods—and not the physical side. It was why Arden lived here, above Udon-Voodun, when Harlan had offered them a room back at the hangout many times before.
That independent nature was why Arden was alive, more than likely. If Arden had lived at the house, they’d be just as dead as the rest, and they would have lost the third board. Jules would never give Arden shit about being a hermit again.
“You know the rest of the way,” Arden hissed, their voice so jittery the words didn’t make sense to Jules for half a second. Nox pushed ahead and tore open a heavy metal door, leading them through the maze of haphazard halls that had grown up around the restaurant into the more ordered chaos of the kitchen.
A stainless steel workstation bisected the kitchen, sinks and prep stations on one side with fryers and cooktops on the other. Flour dusted one long stretch of counter, a folded loaf of dough left midchop on the station. Half-diced onions, pots left on the cooktop with the heat killed beneath them. They had abandoned this place in a hurry. Jules wondered what had driven them out, if there weren’t guns on the ground already. Maybe the woman in the speakers had arranged for some kind of alarm.
Jules’s stomach growled at the leftover scents of fresh food. How long had it been since she last ate? That coffee Nox bought her didn’t count. That’d been medicine, not food. A little tremble wormed its way into her arms. She’d been too long without rest, and the wraith mother could only cover up so much. It must be wearing off by now. She blinked and wiped tiredness from her eyes with the back of her hand.
“You good?” Nox asked.
“Yeah. Yeah. Push on.”
He gave her a look like he didn’t believe her, but there was fuck all they could do about her exhaustion now. The best thing they could do—the only thing they could do that wouldn’t mean death or capture—would be to get the hell out of here and get to a safe place where they could lick their wounds, figurative and literal, and prepare for their next move, whatever the hell that would be.
A pile of steamed buns had been left in a strainer, drying out on a tea towel. Jules wrapped them in the towel and shoved them into her bag. Arden frowned at her, and she shrugged. Wasn’t like the owners would be able to serve that food to anyone—who knew how long it had been sitting out. At least, she hoped they wouldn’t serve it to anyone. She did eat there a lot, after all.
Arden grabbed a cleaver in one hand and a cast-iron skillet in the other and gave them a few experimental swings. Jules had to stifle a laugh, the first time she’d felt anything aside from rage and numbness since she’d walked through the door of her home into a new, bloodied world.
“Easy, tough guy,” she said. They shot her a look, then caught her grin, and their whole face relaxed into a smile.
“Rolling door is down on the front,” Nox said, “so the back door is our best shot. Got dumpsters to the left to cover that flank, but afterward we’re about twenty feet from good cover.”
“Not exactly,” Arden said. “Momma Udon has a private auto she keeps around back. She hates waiting on the cabs when she needs to pick up supplies. I watched her go, earlier, and she took off on foot.”
“Private autos are biometrically locked,” Nox said.
“Please. You hold them off me, I’ll get that car.”
“And this is why we go after the nerds.” Jules winked at Arden’s hurt expression. “You know what to do if we get separated?”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
Jules slipped to point and pressed her side against the grease-stained wall of the kitchen, letting the hammer of her heartbeat fade so she could better hear the sounds beyond. She pressed her ear against the crack in the doorjamb, hoping to catch a hint of something, anything—scuffling boots, or shouted commands—but there was nothing but an eerie silence. No morning in the Grotta was this quiet.
Acutely aware that the woman in the speakers was probably watching her, she dropped one hand to the lever and eased the door open, peering into
the early morning. The rising star had cast away the shadows left by the shut-off streetlights, but hadn’t done much to clarify matters. The buildings of the Grotta were too tall, their alleyways too deep and haphazard. Some Grotta-wrought constructions leaned against each other, sagging over passageways and cutting out all the light. Wasn’t a better place on all of Atrux to slink around in. Good for crime and, as Jules was realizing to her dread, good for hunting.
She hated being the hunted.
Despite the visual clutter, she knew these streets. Not like the back of her hand—that old, idiotic saying had nothing to do with the reality of living in a place like this. A hand could get old. Could get scarred, or tattooed, but ultimately it didn’t change much. These streets were an organic mass. More of a fungus in a damp and forgotten grotto than anything like Alexandria-Atrux. The Grotta was a growth on that city, an extension of the heavily regimented core. A cancer, maybe, in the eyes of those who inhabited the sleek perfection of the heart.
Out here on the fringes—the only place Jules had ever known—the streets may change overnight. Territories shifted, blocking arteries and carving out new veins. Construction came and went, despite the city’s desire to keep the illegal builds under check. And if you lived here long enough, you got a sense for it. Learned to move in the same way it did.
Learned to see that blind alley wasn’t always blind, and that the black van blocking it now was far too clean to be a natural growth.
Jules took aim and fired. The handblaster, cute little tech trick that it was, couldn’t overcome physics. The recoil jerked her arm back, but she’d spent her life peppering inertial bullets, so it was all the same to her and she braced properly, letting her arm flow with the force, feeling the subtle sting in her wrist as the joint compressed.
It traced a misty line of steam through the air and struck its target with a sizzling crack. The blacked-out window of the van shattered, space-grade plex giving it up to Newton’s final middle finger. It sloughed away, revealing a black-clad figure clutching a new hole in their chest. Jules’s body clenched at the sight. Not the death, she’d seen plenty enough of that. But that person looked a hell of a lot like they wore guardcore armor with the identifying insignia filed off.
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