Hotter on the Edge

by Erin Kellison

Mica sighed. "I love Sol, but I can stay only on my terms. Eventually I inherit, but I'm fine if I don't as well."

  "Well then, I guess you'd better start looking for employment." Drum scowled and glanced out of the car's window.

  Mica got her flair for ultimatums from her father. But while hers was a real threat—she could, and had, gone elsewhere—his was empty.

  Drum Sol had two children to succeed him to his corp holdings. Mica, the eldest, who'd proven herself in toil and study and knew every ecosystem and people on Sol. She'd labored in the mines, and had even negotiated that fateful stake system with her father and his shareholders.

  Then there was Pilar, who'd left the work of Sol to her sister and dedicated herself to a marriage of celebrity. Simon knew Pilar well enough to know that she was not merely content to look pretty—she wanted the power and influence of a corp family. She just used her talents differently to get it.

  "Drummond," Mica's mother said, a warning in her voice. Seemed like she didn't trust this new Mica, either. Mica had grown up. All the way up. And they couldn't risk losing her, especially with Pilar becoming a Frust.

  Simon wanted to laugh aloud at them, and commiserate, too. Five years is a long time, isn't it?

  Here they'd engineered Mica's years-long survey on Encantada to get her away from him, to destroy all possibility that Mica would choose him—a miner, of all people!—to wed, and now they were all right back to where they started. Except Mica was tougher. And he didn't care a jot about impressing her father anymore.

  Maybe he'd take the princess after all, and never let her go. If she asked him to marry her again, he'd say yes. They'd had a wild dream once of racing for the stars.

  "Earn the right to have her," Drum had said. Simon could still feel the hard clap on his shoulder. He'd taken it for affection, but it had been a challenge. And one rigged against him.

  Drum rounded on his wife, booming, "So you'd rather he come to the dinner?"

  Michaela shrugged helplessly. "If she leaves ..."

  Pilar looked out of the corner of her eye at her parents. "No. This is my wedding, and I don't want him there."

  Maybe he should remind her that there was a time when she had wanted him. She'd tried her beauty on him. Wanted to take her sister's place in his bed the night Mica had left for Encantada. She'd been a baby then, playing dangerous games.

  "This is an ambassador's dinner," Drum corrected Pilar, "not one of your wedding dinners." Then demanded of Mica, "And just how would you have us introduce him?"

  Simon wanted to hear this, too. He'd been a miner. A murderer. An exile. A scavenger. A would-be thief. How did she see him now?

  "Well, since he refused to marry me ..." Mica began.

  That was five years ago, and his first mistake in a string of others.

  She lowered her lids at him in that new Mica way and smiled her payback. "Introduce him as my consort."

  Consort? Fancy word for kept man.

  The tension gripping his neck made his head pound.

  Because he was at war with the Sols, even the one whom he loved, he scraped a hot, lust-born glare up her gorgeous body, lingering on her breasts before meeting her gaze. He let his desire show nakedly on his face, a promise of what he'd do the next time he was alone with her. He'd be her consort, all right.

  Just look at her blush.

  The rest of the Sols could have their glitter; he only wanted her.

  The ambassador's dinner was held at the Museo del Sol, which housed the Sol family's collection of art and alien artifacts. Simon ascended the white steps to its entrance at Mica's side, but couldn't help overhearing the who? who? who? amid the clamor of the media and spectators that thronged the perimeter. It suddenly occurred to him that his face would be—no, was—all over the sector comms at that very moment as they relayed each movement of the Sol corp family. When he was announced at the entrance as Simon Miner, consort of Princessa Mica Esmerelda Incomparabla Sol, the whos? transformed into avid gossip whispers throughout the gathering.

  He'd only shot her out of the sky and planned to steal a fortune from her family. She had thrust him into hell.

  Security asked for his concealed knife and gun at the door, both of which he gave up reluctantly. And then he stood in a scanner that searched for harmful biomatter.

  Inside the museum, sculptures of earth goddesses at least three meters long and half as wide were suspended from the ceiling over the long dining table, as if puppeted by human-set strings. He couldn't name the goddesses, but they gave the setting a dramatic ideological effect, raising the question, was it the creation gods or terraforming humankind who mastered the universe? It was a favorite debate of ethics and practicality among Mica's academic set, and one he'd listened to her muse about at length in the deep hours of the night. When humanity invoked the "gods" now, they weren't referring to any of these ancient figures. No, "gods" now referred to humankind.

  The food was like nothing he'd ever tasted—courses of dollops and crisps that tantalized his tongue, but didn't satisfy his belly. The women stared at him from within their simmering auras. Some men did too, while others would not signify that he breathed the same air. The latter behavior wasn't much different from when he was a miner.

  A dark-haired woman with old eyes and young cleavage finally leaned her bosom toward him. "I'm sorry, sir, but I don't think I caught your position in the Sol business affairs."

  Consort. Mica could have easily named him her personal guard. Her secretary. Even her research assistant. Well, two could play.

  He bowed his head slightly, happy to oblige. "I see to the sexual needs of Mica Sol, firstborn and heir to the Sol corp."

  Voices stilled around him. A few blinked their surprise.

  The woman pressed her lips together in amusement. "But didn't she just get back from some research somewhere?"

  He nodded, as seriously as he could manage. "I was waiting to see to her immediate needs. She's very demanding."

  Mica sat at a far end of the table, near her family, and conversed with the most important of the sector dignitaries. Simon couldn't hear what she said, but whatever it was made her father's eyes spark with pride and her sister's smile gradually sour. When Mica looked down the long table to where he sat, he raised his glass. Consort, indeed.

  Their gazes were locked in silent communication when movement brought his gaze up higher. He stood, heart stalling, as a massive white thing crashed into the table. One of the goddess statues. Screams shattered the air as glass and food splattered. Mica was flung backward, her place at the table crushed.

  ***

  "I'm fine. See to my father!" Mica gasped when Simon pulled her off the floor. He held her upper arms tightly, searched her expression for signs of pain, and seeming to find her well, turned to dislodge her father from Gaia, the Earth goddess.

  Mica faltered on her high-bladed shoes and grabbed a chair for support. She spotted Pilar and her mother, stunned, but picking themselves off the floor, too. Food splattered the front of her mother's gown and Pilar had a small trickle of blood easing down her temple. But they seemed okay.

  Hakan, the groom, was pinned, but he was cursing—a good sign. Pilar rushed forward to pull him out, which made Mica remember that her little sister wasn't always a brat. That she might actually love him.

  Simon co-opted the help of three other men—Pilar ducked out of the way—and together they were lifting the big-breasted goddess from the trapped guests when new shrieks rose as another suspended statue—the Yoon mother of healing—crashed onto the table. This was worse, as Sr. Prithi Aduyla of Hamburg Station, took a full blow of the goddess's uplifted helping hands and was crushed under her weight. Remaining guests fled for cover or the door.

  A traveling shadow caught Mica's attention above in the white lip of a crawl space that rimmed the perimeter of the main floor and provided ambient lighting. An assassin?

  "Guards!" She pointed upward. But they were assisting the injured and hysterical.

&nbs
p; The service stairway. The only way up to the crawl space, and a little bit farther, the roof, where she'd once set up an antique telescope—a gift for her birthday—to look at the stars, where her heart had wanted to take her.

  Damn her bladed shoes; she could only hobble.

  "Simon!"

  His gaze followed the arrow of her arm, then he vaulted over Gaia's tit to dash toward the concealed door. That's right; he knew the roof, too. They'd spent some nights up there a long time ago.

  A moment later, a second shadow moved down the crawl space. Had to be Simon. Mica clasped her hands to contain her anxiety. He was unarmed, but had grown up rough-and-tumble in the back alleys of Sol before becoming a miner at thirteen. She reminded herself that he could handle a fight.

  The shadows converged, and her heart stopped. Then a body clambered over the edge, as if to commit suicide, but Simon grabbed the assassin's arm before he could fall. From her vantage point, Mica could make out no features, only lily-pale skin swathed in black. The body swung like a large spider.

  Those remaining on the museum floor gasped and sobbed.

  Simon reached with his other arm to double clasp. To save the life.

  But the assassin found purchase with his legs on the wall and wrenched free. Screams followed him down. The assassin broke his back on a reclining marble nude with eerie blank eyeballs.

  Mica's high blades could take her that far without aid. She'd assessed many corpses before, but few humans. She felt stranger still standing over a death in her filmy gown instead of her survey second skin. The assassin's relaxed jaw, in particular, sent a shiver down her spine.

  The person was hairless, including lashes and brows. The facial structure still skewed male. His pale skin was lined with years. Body short and stocky. She felt certain, especially considering the alopecia, that the man was Sol-born. A scavenger.

  "Not another one," her mother said, coming up beside her.

  Mica turned and raised her eyebrows. "Another?"

  Her mother's eyes wandered to take in eavesdroppers. Then, under her breath, "That's the third attempt since this wedding madness started. We've moved up the date, but we can't seem to get Pilar married fast enough."

  Scavengers.

  "And Sr. Adulya," her mother hissed. "This will cause problems. Your father will have to explain."

  The scavenger somehow had gotten inside the museum, perhaps as staff, but since weapons were confiscated and biomatter screened, he'd used what was readily available. Brought the house down.

  A warm arm slipped around her, and she leaned against the familiar wall of a body.

  "We need to get you and your family out of here," Simon urged. "Where there's one ..."

  "Right," Mica finished for him. "…There might be others."

  "Order the car," Simon told her mother.

  Dimly, Mica was aware of her mother moving, the room organizing into purposeful actions. As the guests evacuated, the media bobs found their way inside.

  …Simon Miner…

  …tried to apprehend the assassin, to even save his life…

  …none other than the consort of Mica Sol…

  Voices buzzed around her, but Mica was still arrested by the gawp of the dead man before her. She worked so hard to understand the biology of alien species, but she could not fathom the psychology of her own. Simon had helped her with that.

  A lowborn life, like that of a miner or scavenger, was a life of labor. The chances of escaping that fate were slim. No—Mica regarded Simon, the only person who'd seemed capable of doing it—he'd turned into a lawless criminal, too, taking up the same tactics as the scavengers. She revised her assessment: the chances of escaping a lowborn fate were nil.

  …not hard to see why she chose him to warm her bed…

  …where did he come from?

  …the strength of two men!

  And a life of unending labor was a life of slavery. That life might be more comfortable in Sol City with ready rations and breathable air. But the high plains of the west offered something better—freedom. So the scavengers traded health and long life for self-determination, and hated Sol, and therefore her family, for every hurt their people bore.

  It's why she and Simon had developed the stake system for the mines. Presented it to the shareholders. Got it ratified into law. It had been just the beginning of their ideas for remaking her world. They'd wanted to create doorways through which the enterprising might pass and escape their birth. And right before she'd left, Simon had seemed poised to do just that.

  …hero of the hour…

  …sure to be richly rewarded…

  Why hadn't it worked?

  The weight of the problem settled heavy on her shoulders like the arm of an old companion. Her every step in life as princess and heir of Sol was unbalanced by the load—the inequality among her people. And now she knew what her companion looked like: Lily-pale skin. Stocky body. Unable to grow hair. And in his desperate heart burned the desire to end her family's lives.

  Chapter Five

  A thin-lipped man in the deep golds of the Sol livery showed Simon to his room. Simon knew the palace well enough to know that his quarters—a narrow cell—were located in the servants' hall, and were in their clean modesty better than most of the places he'd laid his head during his life. Very nice, but the room was located on the opposite side of the palace from Mica's—yet one more intervention by Drum Sol.

  However, no self-respecting consort wouldn't show up for work his first night. And definitely not because of a disapproving father. At twenty-six, Mica was well into her majority.

  As Simon suspected, Mica's father didn't know that Simon possessed the family passcodes and could move freely about the palace proper as long as he didn't draw the interest of any of the guards. He'd used the codes often five years ago, planned to use them to get to Pilar's dowry, and even now tapped the override into the light panel to the side of a fielded passageway.

  The common spaces of the Sol palace were vessels of softly filtered light and air, with wide, flat benches to aimlessly count the minutes of the day; all this the rank opposite of the conditions in the mines, which he preferred. Every time he had to cross one of those wide courtyards, his skin tightened. Scaling the wall to her palace rooms was an act of devotion.

  He found her as he'd always found her, in her cluttered study, with her head bent over a textlet. She still wore that filmy dress, but now absently brushed her dark hair while reading. Something about the text made her sad, but when he looked over her shoulder, he discovered an academic rendering of some kind of alien animal.

  She looked up, amusement at his sudden appearance pushing away a bit of her melancholy. "Just like old times?"

  Old times would've involved a welcome kiss. Why not?

  Simon leaned down and brushed his mouth across hers. Yes. Then he tried for a full Mica smile. "I've come to perform my duties."

  The bedroom was just through there. All feminine blues and golds. Curtains to enclose them in a world of their own. And he'd be staying to see to her safety. Sol needed Mica just as much as he did.

  But she didn't smile; she lifted the mandible of some creature for his inspection. He wanted to laugh. Only Mica.

  "See here?" She pointed to a depression in the bone that he would've never noticed otherwise, nor would be able to locate again. "This is a true adaptation; not a bioformed one. Took two hundred years on Sol for it to happen."

  "I see you're in the mood for sexy talk." He lowered his voice suggestively. "Tell me more."

  A light of humor gleamed in her eyes, but her expression hadn't yet caught. He was worried about her after what she'd endured over the past thirty-six hours. And that he was the cause of her distress bothered him even more. He hated her family and their power, but not her.

  "I was thinking about the trials they're doing on Leto," she said. "I've heard that they've been successful in engineering a specialized respiratory system to process the toxic atmosphere."

  Hav
ing listened to her dwell on the subject at length, Simon had the basics. There were three major classes of human-occupied worlds. The alpha class, and the smallest, comprised those worlds that had merged perfectly with mother Terra's bios and supported all the strata of life with little impact to the human genome or lifespan. The sacrifice of some indigenous lifeforms couldn't be helped. Humanity was reaching farther and farther into the deep.

  A beta class world, like Sol, had been terraformed, but nevertheless couldn't support human life without artificial aids like breathers. Terran flora and fauna were adventive; time would tell whether they would survive the native species, but all indications—the dimple in the mandible excluded—pointed to Sol weeding out the foreign matter.

  A gamma class world, like the aforementioned Leto, had no hope of sustaining human life as it was. In order to occupy the planet without comprehensive gear, the humans themselves would have to change, i.e. the gills they seemed to have successfully engineered for their soupy atmosphere. It was the most controversial of the god quests—to alter oneself from sapiens to letans. Of course controversy never stopped research before.

  "I had a mad idea—" she bit her lip, which meant it really had to be crazy "—to submit a proposal reclassifying Sol as a gamma world and starting research that would adapt sapiens to Sol."

  "Gods, woman," Simon said. "That is some dirty talk."

  "It's more a long-term idea. My father would never go for it, and it'll be a hundred years before I take his place. Longer, if advances in age reversal continue as they have."

  Now that made Simon panic. Aging wouldn't be conquered for everyone; only those with the wealth and access to the technology. Lowlifes like him would still grow decrepit and die.

  "Anyway, I think that's what the scavengers are going for with their refusal of aid. I think they are trying to inherit Sol by forcing adaptation the hard way."

  "And the ones who have been attacking your family? Is that about adaptation too?"

  "I think the attacks are for the impatient among them." Thought lines appeared between her drawn brows. "Either way, it's revolution. Anyway, it's something to think about. Something to talk about."