[Corine Solomon 5] Agave Kiss

by Ann Aguirre

  She felt cold eyes on her. Spinning, she saw Lecass watching with a small group of his followers. He had been part of Artan’s regime, but so far, he hadn’t made a move. The man’s inaction troubled her as much as a challenge would. Deliberately, Lecass stared until she gave him her back, a calculated insult. One of these days he would tire of the quiet drama and step things up. Dred would be ready.

  Tam turned as the lights flickered. “That means a ship’s coming in.”

  Because the machinery was so old, it stressed the circuits. The ship couldn’t efficiently light the whole vessel as well as go into lockdown mode. It had been a while since she’d headed toward the docking area to wait for the new fish and look them over. She wasn’t greedy for bodies like Grigor or Priest. Grigor fed on fear, sometimes literally, she thought, and Priest brainwashed his fish into thinking he was the living incarnation of some god. They worshipped him over in Abaddon, which was what he called his section of Charybdis.

  She cocked her head, knowing it was a scary look. “Want to go see what the universe has thrown away today?”

  Tam nodded. “We lost a few guys in the skirmish with Grigor.”

  Most of their daily conflicts occurred with Grigor or Priest, the two greatest threats to Queensland. Grigor had been here longest, and he was constantly pressing to see what new areas he could claim. Dred had the bad luck to be his neighbor. With Priest on one side and Grigor on the other, she was fighting constantly to maintain.

  Sometimes, however, Mungo came out in search of blood; and you had to fight hard against his people. They were the hungriest in the ship. He was a short, red-haired man with a bushy beard, pale blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. By his appearance, one could be forgiven for guessing he was harmless . . . right before he ripped out your throat with his bare hands and tried to eat your face. She’d heard that Mungo liked children best . . . for all kinds of things, and such preferences had gotten him thrown into Charybdis early on.

  They prey on weakness. Uncertainty.

  She had little of either one left in her. Whether her decisions were right or not hardly mattered. Nothing mattered in this hole. The smart ones gave up and died; maybe they found the afterlife that the priests and holy women had promised, shortly after her arrest. At first, during the trial, she had missionaries in her cell every day, trying to save her soul, trying to sell her on Mary’s grace, but after everything she’d seen, everything she’d done, she couldn’t believe.

  Could. Not.

  Over the years, she’d learned to block it out—to read only of her own volition. Otherwise, she lived with a barrage of other people’s twisted violence drumming in her skull at all times. That was probably why she’d snapped. Maybe her sentence would’ve been lighter, at a different facility, if she could have brought herself to whisper those words of remorse the judge so badly wanted to hear.

  But she couldn’t.

  And what that ancient Old Terran philosopher had written so many turns ago was true, after all. He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. She had become what she despised most . . . and she belonged here.

  I am the Dread Queen.

  “Come,” she called to Einar, who caught up to them at a jog.

  “How long until docking?” he asked.

  “Half an hour,” Tam guessed. “When everything goes dark, then we’ll know they’re here.”

  “Let’s see how far we can get.”

  During docking, recruiters didn’t interfere with one another, even if they crossed borders. This one time, it was allowed, because otherwise it would be impossible for any group to augment its numbers, save the one in closest proximity. On this side, that would be Priest. He cared only for adding worshippers, but it often took longer for convicts to succumb to his brand of brainwashing. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made for a quick pitch.

  Still, she didn’t linger in Priest’s territory. Since they moved fast, they reached the second set of doors before the lights went down, and the barricades came up, along with the energy fields that would fry anyone who tried to cross. A few distant screams told her that some convicts had a timing problem.

  Uneasily, they shared the space with Silence’s people, unusual, because the quiet killer didn’t often take an interest. But it had been a while for her too. Silence must have advisers who let her know that if she killed too many of her own people out of sport, then she wouldn’t have the numbers to drive off anyone intent on taking her territory. There were six in all . . . and hers was among the largest with space on all decks. The lifts didn’t work, but she had shaft access, which meant her people could sneak around the ship unseen. Tam was particularly good at it.

  There was a neutral zone just past the docking bay, a shantytown inside the prison ship, where fish often huddled until they realized it was worse there than when they affiliated. Townships had rules at least, enforced by the leader’s people. The neutral zone had only one: take whatever you can. It was impossible to sleep safely there without being robbed, raped, or shanked, sometimes all in the same night. And so she’d tell anyone she deemed worthy of a second look.

  That was the extent of Dred’s pitch: Come with me, and you may not die. There was no reason to be more persuasive. The smart ones listened.

  In the dark, it was eerie with only the red glow from the nearby shock field and the crackle of electricity. Silence’s people didn’t talk, even among themselves, and their behavior made for an uneasy truce. Tam kept a hand on his shiv, eyeing them with wary attention. On her other side, Einar played the role of gentle giant, but he wasn’t gentle. Nobody inside Charybdis was. If they’d been sent up on a wrongful conviction, then they learned to fight, or they died.

  Einar had been inside longer than Dred, and she’d been here for five turns before she got tired of etching hash marks into a sheet of metal to mark the days. Forever wasn’t a number anyway. It just was. At her best guess, she was thirty turns, give or take. She had been killing for three years before she got caught. Before she got cocky. At the height of her career, she’d thought they’d never figure it out.

  Ah, hubris.

  At last, the vigil ended. The lights came back up and the security measures died, which meant it was safe to proceed. Pushing to her feet, Dred signaled her two men and jogged past the two sets of security doors, through Shantytown, and toward the reception area, where fish always milled around, as if expecting to be greeted by guards, someone to tell them where to go, what to do, how to get food or water. Poor, stupid fish.

  This crop looked particularly sad. A few of them were crying, faces wedged between their knees. They all wore prison-issue gray, numbers and chips in the backs of their necks. Most of them had been shorn and deloused, though a few looked as though they had been dragged from the darkest hole in the system, then set on fire. The weak and wounded wouldn’t last long; she ignored them.

  Then her gaze lit on a man near the back. At first glance, he looked young, but his eyes refuted the initial assessment. Though he was slim and clean with a crown of shining blond hair, his summer sky eyes held a hardness that came only from turns of fighting, turns of violence and despair. He might well be the most dangerous man on the ship. Time to find out if he’s stable. Giving Tam and Einar the order to guard her, she closed her eyes and let slip the dogs of war.