She grabbed the prosthetic and yanked it free, then twisted, giving herself as much room to swing as possible, and slammed it into Pink’s side. The woman screeched in pain, and dropped Sanda back into the chair. Sanda wound back and—crack!—again in the side, ribs crunching. Pink hit the ground and curled up around herself, groaning, cursing in a language Sanda didn’t know.
“You fucking bitch—” the bald one said, starting toward her, but Graham squeezed off a shot and the laser blast came close enough to singe her ear and punched a black-cauterized hole in the wall behind her.
“She said we’re leaving,” Graham said.
The bald one stepped back, hands up in surrender. A sneer twisted her mouth. “Too late, they’re here.”
Sanda’s heart hammered as she craned her neck around to see what the bald one was looking at, eyes bright with triumph.
Graham flanked Sanda, and in the doorway another man stood. He wasn’t tall, not exactly, but something about his build gave the impression of largeness that had nothing to do with height. Sanda had known men like him in the fleet who had tried out for the guardcore and been turned down for being too big, too hard to disguise in the guardcore armor.
But this man wasn’t fleet. Bald Hair wouldn’t know that, not unless she’d spent a lot of time studying fleet attire. He wore the standard Prime jumpsuit, was strapped up with enough weapons to give a gunship envy, wore scuffed mag boots, and had the same crew cut most people of the fleet favored. The weapons he carried were high-end, modern, and well cared for. But his insignia were missing. If he’d told her he once served in the fleet, she would have believed him. But he wasn’t a member now, and now was what mattered.
“Major Greeve?” he asked.
“I am.” There wasn’t any point in pretending otherwise.
His dark brown eyes narrowed in determination. “Nice to meet you.”
Three shots, clean as anything. Bang, bang, bang, and the brains of the SecureSite painted the hotel walls.
“What the fuck,” she said.
He holstered the weapon and stepped into the room, expert fingers digging through the pockets of the rapidly cooling bodies.
Graham sighed and pocketed his blaster. “Sanda, allow me to introduce you to Nox.”
“You got old,” Nox said to Graham without looking up from his looting.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Graham said.
“Hold on a fucking minute.” Sanda thrust her prosthetic at Nox like a pointing stick, realized it was dripping blood, then grimaced and tried to wipe it clean on the rug. “That wasn’t necessary, was it? They were just some local toughs.”
“Local toughs with the fleet coming to back them up. You’d have been captured in three minutes.” Nox glanced at his wristpad and grimaced.
“Speaking of, we gotta run. Now.”
“Where are we going?” Sanda strapped the leg back on.
“A safe house. Arden wants to talk.”
CHAPTER 12
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
JUST SOME GROTTA RAT
Everything Jules had learned about Rainier’s operation indicated that she should call her over this. That an underling going where she wasn’t allowed was a huge violation, that this was big-boss time, and Jules was being actively seditious in not calling it in.
But doing so wouldn’t allow her the opportunity to punch Marya on her cute button nose.
Jules’s heart hammered in her throat but she wouldn’t run, didn’t dare let the scientists holed up in the lab catch her panicking by going hell-bent down the hall. She wasn’t panicking. She wasn’t. The thump-thump in her throat constricted her air until she pushed her breath out through her nose and gasped it back in. Clamp it down. Don’t let the wound split raw.
Lolla’s stats were always up on her wristpad, a half-opacity window floating off to the left, forever in her digital peripheral vision. There had been no change. Lolla was safe. The elevator wouldn’t move fast enough.
She squeezed through the doors before they were all the way open. Down here, where there were no eyes but Rainier’s to see her, Jules broke into a sprint. Fear constricted her breath, but her augmented body ignored those needs, pumped her legs like pistons.
Her ident opened the door when she drew in range. Though Rainier had full roam of the station whenever she was on board in person, this room alone was coded to Jules and no other. Marya should not have been able to enter it.
Should not be able to hover above Lolla’s clear coffin, her dark hair—crimped from being too long in a helmet—hanging over the side of her face like a curtain. Obscuring everything except the point of her chin and the greedy, grasping stretch of her fingers straining toward the panel inset on the center of the coffin. The panel that controlled everything.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Jules snapped.
Marya jumped, snatching her hand back as if burned. “Who is she?”
Jules narrowed her eyes and stalked toward Marya, who walked backward to keep the distance between them. Jules didn’t spend a lot of time looking at herself in the mirror—not these days—but she knew the look that must be on her face now, the molten rage ready to burn everything to the ground at the slightest provocation. She saw that expression reflected not in any mirrored surface, but in the shirking hunch of Marya’s shoulders, the wild dash of her gaze from side to side as she instinctively sought an escape route.
“None of your fucking business.” Jules kept on advancing, never quite letting Marya get too far, or too close. Too close would end in blood, and as much as Jules wanted that, Rainier would be pissed. Marya circled the coffin.
“She’s one of the failed, isn’t she?”
Jules said nothing. A tendon in her jaw twitched. She hated that word. It didn’t matter that it meant the ascension-agent hadn’t taken hold, hadn’t transformed the human body into something more, something stronger.
The implication of failure matched nothing Jules felt about Lolla. Lolla was brilliant and quick and shining and didn’t fail at a damn thing she touched. If Lolla’s coma was anyone’s fault, it was Rainier’s.
“She is,” Marya said. “What is she to you? Sister? Lover? I knew Rainier had to be keeping a test subject around.”
“You’re leaving.”
Marya dug her heels in and stood her ground. “No. This girl is swimming in the stuff. I’ve waited long enough, Valentine, even you have to admit that. I’m tired of waiting around for Rainier to pull her head out of her ass and decide it’s time to dose me with the agent.”
“Is this what you want?”
Jules placed her hand on the coffin. The cold, deep and dead as old stone, soaked through her skin and into her heart. “To fall into an endless sleep from which you may never awaken?”
“Rainier picked Liao to get the scientists in line. She’ll be able to amplify the correction signal into the agent-altered cells soon enough. The sleep is not endless. And besides, it worked for you.”
Jules hated the reminder. Hated that she could, at will, cut out the feeling of that cold glass. Jules pressed her palm down harder, greedy for the aching bite of false winter.
“There is no reason it should have.” Jules forced the words out, guilt making her tongue thick. “No fucking reason in all the ’verse the agent let me live and plunged her into this endless nothing. Do you want to roll those dice, Marya? Do you trust our scientists so much?”
She lifted her chin. “I trust Rainier.”
“And Rainier wants you to wait.”
Marya’s lips creased with disdain. “She gave it to you and your street rat—”
Jules’s fist connected with Marya’s jaw. A spray of blood arced, leaving a fine mist across the foot of Lolla’s coffin, reaching up to the synthetic sunlight–lamps, falling back down against Marya’s sharp cheeks and upturned jaw. Satisfying pain vibrated through Jules’s fist.
Marya staggered backward, covering her jaw with both hands, blood dribbling through her fin
gers from the split in her lip. A primal groan rumbled deep in her throat. Her golden eyes narrowed above the cover of her hands.
“Don’t piss off the professional killer,” Jules said.
Marya worked her mouth over and spat a glob of blood on the floor. “You’re a mistake. A gutter-fuck nothing that tripped into the agent and survived because you had more muscle than brain. Once Rainier can send the correction signal, you’re done. Nothing.”
“Rainier’s not here to protect you, Marya. Get out before I break your other teeth.”
Marya sneered, blood staining her teeth yellow-orange. “You’re replaceable.”
Jules took a step. Marya broke eye contact and huffed, turning her back deliberately before stomping out of the room.
The door shut. Jules sank into a crouch, one hand on Lolla’s coffin, the injured hand dangling between her knees, eyes pressed shut so hard a dull throb started up in the back of her head. She’d been feeling that headache a lot lately.
Mistake. That’s what she was. From the day she was birthed screaming into life to the day she walked into that rotting warehouse.
A thought—a temptation—nagged at her. Call Nox. Call Arden. Ask for help.
But they could do nothing for her now. Fucking hell, how she needed help, because Marya was right. No matter how often Rainier crowed about Jules being special and how precious Lolla was to them both, she knew it was an act. Something about Jules amused Rainier for the time being, and as soon as she lost her usefulness or entertainment value, she was out.
Jules pressed her palms against both sides of her head to soothe the building ache.
She was no fool. She’d administered the memory rollback often enough to recognize the pain in her brain wasn’t stress. Not in this body.
The ascension-agent had changed her, hardened her. Made her flesh and blood something stronger, something new. Of all the aches she could deaden, the headaches would not leave. Could not. A void ached in her memory in concert with that pain, a shapeless reminder of things she’d done that she could never recall. Sometimes, late at night, she’d stay up trying to remember until the pain became too much and she blacked out.
The void only contracted. Not growing smaller—never less—but concentrated. Dense. Until she feared it would collapse her upon herself. Until she was well and truly out of Rainier’s claws, it was best to keep Arden and Nox out of the orbit of her self-destruction, because not even she understood what she had become.
Lolla. The only thing holding her together.
She pushed herself to her feet and pulled her sleeve up, covering her palm. Her sleeve smeared Marya’s blood across the plex as she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
CHAPTER 13
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ONCE A SPY
Tomas was, in theory, winding down. The Atrux safe house hosted a wide variety of distractions, once one made it through the initial debriefing. VR immersion rooms, analog games, a wide selection of media and literature stored on the local network. Everything was peeled away from the net at large—an excision, cauterized, so that there would be no bleed-over.
He could do whatever he liked for the next few days, so long as whatever he liked didn’t involve walking out the door, making calls, or otherwise having any contact with the outside world. So he played pool alone on a patio screened in with a video feed meant to mimic a tropical garden and tried not to crawl out of his skin with anxiety.
“What’s the weather today, house?” he asked the local AI, because no one else had bothered talking to him in the last three days. That he knew how long it had been violated his confinement. Clocks didn’t load in the safe house, and neither did calendars. In theory, this was a place to decompress after a tough mission, to slough off the petty pressures of the world.
He’d never been good at that. And though he’d never witnessed his colleagues going through the same thing, he suspected none of them were very good at it, either. Being a Nazca didn’t come with the luxury of being able to turn off one’s internal clock.
“Dome systems are functioning normally,” the house said.
Tomas rolled his eyes and lined up another shot on the pocket. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Weather conditions outside are not relevant to your stay.”
He almost scratched his shot. The house was starting to sound remarkably like Bero, answering his questions with deflections. A function of its security protocols, but still unsettling. Maybe he did need to decompress. Somewhere tropical with a real-sand beach. But could he, when he didn’t know what had happened to Sanda?
No, of course not, but the thought was nice.
The internal door opened. Tomas made a point of keeping his head down, lining up another shot, while a familiar gait stepped toward him.
“You’ve always been terrible at this game, I don’t know why you insist on playing it.”
“Precisely because I am terrible, Sitta.”
“Caid.”
He cracked off a shot, winced as the one ball careened off the white into the eight and, naturally, deposited that foreboding ball into the pocket. Tomas sighed and leaned back, resting the cue against his shoulder like a rifle. “This is the kind of thing I should be good at.”
“Luckily, you have other talents. Shall we?”
He’d given himself enough time to rein himself in. Tomas looked up. Five years had slithered by since he’d last seen Sitta Caid, and he wished it would have been more. Her head came up to his chest, and he suspected she made a point of wearing the flattest-soled shoes she could find. He never saw her in anything with a thicker sole than a mag boot. She didn’t need the height. Sitta Caid had a presence that would make kings weep if she but curled her lip in disdain.
“It’s been a long time, Caid.”
“We expected longer. The Greeve retrieval contained a nontrivial chance of timeline separation.”
“Timeline separation?” He chuckled. “Did they make that up just for me?”
She lifted one shoulder, the movement enhanced by the triangular points of her titanium-white blazer. “The Nazca are in the business of quantification, and we required a new line item to assess that retrieval account. It was conceivable that, if the gate was dismantled, you would be beyond the reach of FTL travel. Hence: timeline separation. Simple accounting.”
Tomas snorted. “I saw Biran’s house. You mined him for every scrap of credit he had.”
Not even a shoulder this time. “You disapprove?”
“I make no moral judgment on the Nazca.”
It was Caid’s turn to snort. “Lavani would be delighted to get such a straight lie out of you.”
“Lavani can rot, and I didn’t mean the mission, Caid, I meant the three days you’ve kept me canned up in here. I’m due personal time. That was the deal I made for taking on your mission ‘with risk of timeline separation.’”
“Containment is essential after long missions, should any adverse mental or physical health events occur.”
“You mean so that you can observe me to see if I’m nervous, or if I try to contact anyone or anyone tries to contact me.”
Her smile was slow, and she crossed her arms over her chest, adjusting to better accommodate a slim electronic folder tucked under one armpit. “Yes. I do. You know our dance, Nazca, and you know which steps come next.”
He groaned and made a show of stretching out his back. “Another interrogation.”
“Debriefing.”
“Sure.” He racked the cue and gestured toward the door. “After you.”
“No. Not the chair.” She waved her hand and the viewscreens flipped from pleasant trees and birds to blank, endless black. Tomas suppressed a shudder, recalling Bero’s manipulation of the viewscreens to fit his story that the system was dead and the planets rendered to dust. A heady reminder that, in his work, the only input he could believe was what he experienced hands-on.
“Sit.” She pointed to a wrought iron bistro table, flanked by t
wo chairs. He pulled one out for her, deferring to his superior, and settled down on his own cushion covered in a print of large, long-dead tropical flowers. She opened the electronic folder and spread it out over the table. He leaned back and kicked one ankle up on his knee. She scowled, for only a second, but it was enough to give him the warm fuzzies.
“Tell me about Sanda Greeve.”
“I—what? What about her? I have whole dossiers of pre-op research, and Lavani has my post-mission notes.”
Caid sighed in the calculated way of a teacher disappointed with a student, which wasn’t entirely wrong. She’d recruited him, trained him. Vouched for him when he’d done stupid things that inevitably gave results. They had a long and storied working relationship, but in his darker moments he was pretty certain it functioned only because of their mutual disdain. Caid believed in the Nazca. Tomas believed in his paycheck.
“Nazca Cepko.”
“Tomas.”
“Cepko. Lavani has filed a motion for deep interrogation. I am here to assess if that eventuality is required.”
His throat went dry. He thought he’d done a pretty good job of dancing around Lavani. He’d damn near given her everything, after all. He’d even alluded to the fact that the Icarions were doing biomechanical research on board Bero, though he’d declined to know anything about the details. That Sanda carried the chip of a dead Keeper with coordinates to an unknown location in her head was the only thing he’d kept back. And he’d kept back a lot more on other mission debriefings without tripping the chair.
“I don’t understand. I did not lie to Lavani.”
“Of course you did. We all lie in debriefings, do not think you are special in that. We are an agency of spies, lying is an old habit, a tic and an addiction all at once. Oh—don’t look so surprised. Even I lie in my debriefings. I have lied to you tonight already. It is a muscle we must flex to keep in fighting form. But on this matter, the Nazca must know: What do you think of Sanda Greeve, really?”
Tomas licked his lips and kept his palms on his knee. “Why didn’t you debrief me?”
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