Maybe she was jealous. Wouldn’t matter much longer, anyway. She had one more op to pull, before they either killed her or arrested her, and she needed to move now, because she hadn’t exactly been discreet in covering her tracks. That was the point. She wanted the authorities-that-be to track her here, to this hellhole of a warehouse where her life had started to go sideways. Wanted someone with real, official power to find the lab between the walls. The cracks they’d missed in their society, and what had fallen into them.
Jules flung her dead wristpad into the canal, severing her connection to all humanity. The isolation, intense and crushing, freed her in a way she didn’t really understand. What she did next was just for her. She was going to do one good thing before her life was taken out of her hands. She was going to fulfill her promise to Harlan: find Lolla.
Weighted down with half of Nox’s arsenal, she skirted the edge of the warehouse until she found the back door they’d used to load out the wraith crates. No point in coming through the other way—it’d just slow her down, and she didn’t mean to be discreet about this break-in.
She pulled the handblaster out of its holster and crouched, grabbing the handle of the accordion door and sliding it up just enough so she could shimmy under it in a crab crawl. The lights were down low—not off, but in some sort of standby mode that cast everything in a faint blue glow.
She slipped under the door and left it open—an invitation to whoever would follow her—and paused just inside, her back pressed against the wall. The place was as silent as it had been on that first night. Not so much as the subtle whir of an HVAC system broke the silence. Only Jules’s breathing, soft and calm, made any noise at all.
How long had she gone without sleep? Without food or proper hydration? Yet her body felt calm, stable. Her heartbeat steady and regular—as if she’d entered some zen headspace the second she’d decided to ditch Nox and Arden and handle things herself.
A flicker of a thought—that she was taking point before she was ready again, that doing something like this had gotten Harlan killed and Lolla taken—surfaced and was snuffed just as quickly. This was the only play she had left. Nox may make pretty noises about lying low and regrouping so they could come back for Lolla, but they both knew that was bullshit to make them okay with abandonment. Once they’d flown the nest, that’d be it. They’d never come back. They’d never find out what happened to Lolla, or why Harlan had to die for a couple of smartboards that had, as far as they could tell, some sort of drug for Keepers mocked up on it.
Jules couldn’t go out like that. She’d end up the same way as her mother: with a needle in her arm, trying to forget her many failings as the soft wave of oblivion washed her away to her final rest.
Part of her wanted that end, and that was the problem. It wasn’t just easy. It was bliss.
“I know someone’s in here,” she shouted into the empty room. Her voice echoed off the tiles, mocking her. Nothing but her own breathing answered.
A temptation to ransack the place drew her. To knock over lab tables, smash smartboards, and crush tablets under her boots. But the people she was drawing here would need all the evidence they could get to figure out what was going on. And anyway, it looked like most of the goods had been either secured or cleared out. She hoped the former.
She steadied her blaster and urged her hands to stop shaking. Sometime between cleaning out Nox’s hideout and making her way back to the warehouse district she’d eaten a brick of nutrient bar and slammed some coffee—just enough to keep her upright for this. That’s all she needed. She wanted a stiff drink but wouldn’t let herself get sloppy.
She crept through the lab, blaster up and ready to fire. The door to the office she’d found the wraith mother in had been left ajar. She nudged it with her shoulder, stalking inside, not sure what she wanted more—something to shoot, or nothing to oppose her. An empty room awaited, the desk stripped clear, the alcove in the wall where she’d broken the vial empty.
The door alongside the alcove called to her. Jules pressed her ear against the cold surface, listening. If anyone was here—and she knew that woman in the speakers would be waiting for her—they didn’t make a sound on the other side. There wasn’t even a hint of light beneath the door.
Jules reached for the handle, expecting an alarm to sound, but nothing happened as she swung the door open. It wasn’t even locked.
And neither was the roll door, come to think of it. And her footsteps had not set off the pressure alarm that’d caught them up their first time.
Either she was expected, or the woman had cleaned this place out. Jules didn’t like either answer. She checked the time—she’d been in the lab ten minutes, and it’d been a full hour since she’d disappeared from the net. No time for second-guessing.
Jules kicked the door open and burst into a hallway that lit up as she entered, inset lighting along the ceiling casting the place in a soft white glow. It slanted downward, into the rock of Atrux. Outside, she could barely hear the crunch of heavy-duty tires over dirty pavement. Jules’s heart rate kicked up. Lolla. Find Lolla.
She rushed down the hall, just short of a run so she could keep her blaster level, and kicked open the next door. A cavernous room greeted her—some kind of warehouse, the yellowed lights dribbling highlights across black metal shelves stacked to the ceiling. Crates, much like the wraith crates her crew had jacked, piled on those shelves. Hundreds, thousands of them. Jules almost laughed from a burst of hysteria. How close they’d been to the biggest score of their lives and never known.
“Come out!” she shouted. Her voice slammed against the stone walls and punched back at her, the echo sharp. Her vision adjusted. Her stomach dropped. They had already come out—she just hadn’t seen them yet.
Black shapes moved in between the shelves. Guardcore, or their serial-number-removed shadows. Five of them, at least. She dropped to a knee as a blast from a stunner flashed above her head, the brightness temporarily stripping her ability to pick out the shapes moving through the murky light.
She scrambled across the ground, crawled behind a stack of crates and put her back to them, firing off a shot in the direction the light had come from. A crate exploded on the shelf—a burst of greenish-blue flame licking up the black metal legs of the shelving unit. Acrid smoke filled the air, making Jules cough.
Wraith shouldn’t go up like that. She ducked down and jammed her thumb under the latch of a crate and flung it open. Plex bottles in fitted foam filled the thing, much larger than street doses of wraith—larger even than what she usually saw handed out to dealers. Not wraith, then, but its base components. And if there was one thing growing up with a junkie mother had taught her—those ingredients were highly explosive.
A burst of gunfire thundered in the warehouse.
“Don’t kill her!” a woman—the woman in the speakers—shrieked. “I need her!”
Jules could work with that. She fired off a round of suppressive fire in the direction the shots had come from and scrambled like a madwoman, crab crawling her way to cover behind a set of crates as far away from the ones she’d just left as she could manage.
“You need me?” she shouted. “Why don’t you show yourself?”
“People,” the woman sighed out the word. “So focused on sight.”
The soft click of heeled feet sounded down a row of shelves close to where she’d crouched before. Jules dared to pop her head up to get a look.
There she was, the woman who haunted her dreams. She wore a fitted white dress, slit up to the hip, a pair of patent cream heels doing the clicking against the floor. She had the willowy build of someone who never lifted anything heavy in their life, and eyes too wide for her narrow face. Ash-blond hair rolled over her shoulders in thick waves, an older style popular with those who spent little to no time in zero-g and didn’t have to worry about finding the time to keep it clean and styled. Everything about the woman screamed money and leisure, not a wraith warehouse working with illegal Keeper tech
.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jules demanded.
“I am one of Rainier Lavaux, and you have proved most interesting, Juliella.”
Great. A crazy woman. She’d make this bitch one of the dead if she didn’t hand over the kid, and fast. “Where’s Lolla?”
Shadows of guardcore skirted closer to her but kept their distance, orbiting Rainier to protect her if the need arose.
“Who?” she asked, tilting her head. Boot steps pounded down the hallway above.
“The girl! Lolla—the young one at my home! There wasn’t a—a body!”
“The little one? She’s not here.”
Jules closed her eyes. Not here. The blithe way Rainier said those words—as if it were baffling why Jules would even ask, shook something loose in her. She believed those words, believed them fully. Lolla was not here, and the boots were coming, and the guardcore was closing, and everything she’d done had been for nothing but a bitter end.
She tapped the blaster against her thigh. Not here. Well, then.
“Good,” she said.
The door burst inward. The guardcore rushed her. Jules lifted her blaster and sighted down the crate she’d discovered full of chemicals. She pulled the trigger, and all the world was light and pain and then—nothing.
Bliss, maybe, in the end.
CHAPTER 58
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
FORTY DAYS OF BEING A TOOL
The Protectorate has decided,” Biran said. “If you would come with me, please?” He stood with his hands clasped at the small of his back, his face contorted into a mask of trying-too-hard professionalism.
“Just tell me, B.”
The formalism washed out of him in a rush, his shoulders slouching as he shook out his hands and bowed his head a little, trying not to look her in the eye. “Can’t. Gotta jump through the hoops.”
She rolled her eyes. “Little B, king of bureaucracy.”
So she was going to have to go through the farce of listening to their petty reasonings. Tomas helped her up, and with the crutch biting into her armpit, she followed her brother back into the meeting room. All the screens had gone blank, only the Keepers on board remained—save Lavaux.
Biran took his place at the foot of the table and leaned forward, fingers splayed on the tabletop as if he were bracing himself. She wished he’d get it over with already.
“The Protectorate has decided that it is in the best interests of Prime to withdraw from this system, and has denied your request to attempt contacting the rogue ship, The Light of Berossus.”
No shit, she wanted to say. But she just inclined her head. “I am disappointed, but I understand. What is the timeline?”
“We have been attempting to track Bero based on his last known location and certain markers our people have picked up on. The ship is stealthed and proving difficult to find, but with your knowledge of the ship’s preferences we would like you to attempt a tightbeam message requesting the ship relinquish itself into Keeper care within four hours. If the ship does not, then gunships are in place to eliminate the threat. After the Protocol has been dealt with, we will return to Ada to celebrate your safety and begin the evacuation procedures.”
“You’re going to ask Bero to turn himself in, through an unsecured tightbeam?”
Biran spread his hands. “We have no way of knowing the ship’s private tag. The one Nazca Cepko communicated to us no longer functions.”
“Even if you hit Bero with that tightbeam, and he listens, Icarion will overhear and come running to intercept.”
“We expect as much. But our fleet in the area outguns theirs by a substantial percentage.”
“And this celebration?”
Biran looked down. “Ada has been informed, publicly, of your safe recovery. A function has been planned at Keep Station. Our fathers are very much looking forward to seeing you.”
Sanda slammed a fist down on the tabletop, making everyone in the room cringe. “You sonuvabitch, Biran. You told our dads I was safe? Before or after you made me pirouette for your Protectorate buddies?”
“Major Greeve,” Singh said, “please calm yourself. You are a hero of war and expected to behave with some sense of noble decorum.”
“Answer me.”
Biran’s throat bobbed. His lips flapped a little until he gathered himself and pressed them shut so hard they damn near disappeared.
“I couldn’t let you go,” he said softly. “It’s suicide. The tightbeam will allow you sufficient chance to speak with the ship.”
“He won’t listen. A tightbeam coming in from a Keeper-commanded warship? Even if it’s got my voice in it, he won’t believe I haven’t been pressed into the thing. It’s gotta be me on a shuttle, knocking on his door, or nothing at all.”
“You have the tightbeam—”
“Fuck off.” She thrust the crutch under her arm and stomped as fiercely as she could out of the room, anger making heat rise from the funnel of her jumpsuit neck.
“Sanda—” Biran said, unable to mask his pain. She shoved her sympathy down.
“You must submit to a medical evaluation!” Singh called after her, but the door swished shut before she could hear anything else.
A couple of soldiers stared after her, bug-eyed, as she hustled down the hall. Their shock seemed a little overdone, pissed-off people stomped around after meetings all the time, but then reality dawned on her. They weren’t staring at a miffed kidnap victim. They were staring at an infuriated hero of war, one they’d been told about. One they’d been puffed up to admire. Wasn’t just shock in their eyes. Was a bit of fear, too.
“You.” She stabbed a finger at an open-mouthed private. “Where are the shuttles on this bucket?”
“Sh-shuttles, Major?”
“Personal transports, you know the type.”
He brightened and brought up his wristpad for her to see as he jabbed at the ship’s schematics. “Wing 3S, anti-spin-ward of the radiator couplings. You gotta take the freight lift to get to them. This ship has some of the finest you’ll ever find, Hermes-Class. Fast little bastards. I mean, ships.”
“Point me toward the freight elevator, please.”
He frowned, hit a button, then bumped her wristpad with his own. The same schematic popped up on her screen. “Bump tech got put in last year,” he said sheepishly.
“Perfect, thank you.” She turned at the intersection indicated by the map, sweat beading between her shoulder blades. She needed food. Rest. Medicine.
But Lavaux had said the ship would be stationary for twenty-four hours, and she knew damned well how hard it was to launch a shuttle from the back of a bucket hitting the gas.
“Hold the fuck up.” Tomas gripped her shoulder hard enough to bring her to a stop. She shook him off. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“You’ve got a couple of neurons left to fire off. Why don’t you use them and guess?”
“Hey, don’t be shitty with me, I’m on your side.”
She sighed and leaned against the wall to take some weight off the crutch. She’d have a mean-looking bruise in her armpit by the end of this. She’d be tender for weeks. “Sorry. Don’t have a lot to chat about.”
He must have kick-started that spy brain of his into gear, because he nodded solemnly and didn’t push. She needed to get off this ship before the medis poked around her body and stumbled across her illegal Keeper chip. Grimly, she wondered how they’d play that. They’d have to figure out some other explanation as to why they had to kill their so-called hero.
“Things do like to go from bad to worse around you.”
“Which is why you need to stay here.”
She moved to push off the wall, but he leaned forward, planting one palm firmly beside her shoulder and shadowing her body with his. “Safe bores me.”
The intensity in his gaze made her toes tingle. “I gotta admit, I was hoping you’d say that.”
CHAPTER 59
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
&nb
sp; TOOL TIME’S OVER
The freight elevator made Bero’s look like a laundry chute. The Taso was obviously built for more industrial affairs than what Sanda had planned. As it hummed down the shaft, the subtle pings and hisses that accompanied all spaceships echoing in the overlarge chamber, she felt exposed. It didn’t help that the gleam of a silvery camera was pointed straight at her, winking.
“Stop fidgeting,” Tomas said, voice low.
She rested her hand against the middle bar of her crutch and gripped tight, forcing herself to keep from drumming her fingers. “Disobeying orders isn’t something I do on the regular.”
“Typical soldier.” He grinned. “Gotta start thinking like a major.”
“I’m pretty sure majors don’t ignore direct orders from the Keeper Protectorate.”
“There’s a first for everything. And majors usually answer to their generals, don’t they? And anyway, at least one Protectorate member gave you the wink-nudge to leave.”
She jabbed at the hangar level button again, willing the elevator to move faster. “Hell if I know. I haven’t exactly had my introductory training.”
She wasn’t willing to implicate Keeper Lavaux in any of this. That man may have nearly picked Sanda up by the scruff and shoved her out of the ship, but the Keepers would have a hard time proving it based on their thin conversation in the waiting room. She didn’t want to slip up and give them anything else they could use against Lavaux. Keepers stripped of their post faced the same fate she was trying to avoid.
She scratched the back of her head with her free hand, caught a look from Tomas, and made herself stop. Bloody thing wasn’t bothering her until she knew it was there. Now she felt like her skin was about to split open every time she moved her head.
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