Arden’s eyes went huge with realization. “The wraith-mother at the warehouse. She tried to hide that she’d touched it, I thought she was embarrassed about being high, but it could have been this stuff.”
“Moving quickly doesn’t mean your friend’s synthetic,” Sanda said.
“No,” Nox said. “But you didn’t see how quickly she healed after our last fight in the Grotta. She hid it, but after she took off, I had to clean our hideout, burn everything. There wasn’t any blood on her cast-off bandages.”
CHAPTER 70
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THE HURT
Connections. The tenuous, fibrous social construct that made up your place in the world. Jules had always felt that connections were for other people. The rich and the powerful, or those on the edges of those circles. People who could maneuver and make deals—found worlds and shake industries. Those people were connected. Not Grotta kids. Not the algal film of Atrux.
It was only the first on a long list of assumptions she’d been wrong about. The Grotta was a shithole, but it’d been her shithole. She’d set down roots—light-shy, thin roots—and given herself some weight in that world, some sense of grounding. Human beings weren’t meant to be in space—to be untethered and floating. They were meant to be rooted. Stabilized. Everything humanity made after the Charon Gate was a mistake. Jules certainly was.
But she’d been dug up, tossed into the world she thought she’d wanted. Credit was never a problem, Rainier kept her flush. Sometimes she thought Rainier didn’t understand the concept of money. Jules could funnel some of that money away. Build a base for herself somewhere safe. Flourish. But it would mean abandoning Lolla. Even if she stole all the credit of the united worlds, no mind but Rainier’s could reverse what had been done to her friend. Her surrogate sister.
That had been the point of the maze. Not the research—though she was certain Rainier had a use for that, even if it wasn’t what Jules herself wanted—but the pressure of being. Janus was mostly empty because Rainier had wanted to see what Jules would do with that, what kind of social-political networks she could build.
And she’d done fuck-all. She’d let her severed roots shrivel, grafted herself to Lolla, and struggled against every damn little thing. Maybe Rainier had judged her wrongly, made a mistake in putting her there. But Jules was pretty sure Rainier, for all her lack of understanding humanity, didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. Jules had been meant to fester. To grow bitter, paired up with a woman who came from the easier world she’d only glimpsed.
Jules hated that it had worked.
She checked her rifle. The weapon was smooth in her hands, even through the black gloves that encased her fingers. Finer weapons, finer materials. The stock and grip and barrel lacked any of the small divots and scratches, smears of stray oil and grit, that older guns carried. These rifles showed no sign they had ever been used. She could have lifted it fresh out of its mold in the crate foam, just like the armor that hung on her body.
Smooth and matte and black as space. The guardcore armor hugged, its internal shape filled with foams that clung and hardened to her so that what was uniform on the exterior fit on the interior. A Jules-shaped space in the middle of a void of faceless violence.
The others kept their helmets up. Jules had never seen them and had no desire to see them now. Their faces didn’t matter, nor did their stories, their voices. They were more pawns on Rainier’s board, just like her. Just like Marya.
But unlike Jules, Marya had gotten what she wanted and found her way out of Rainier’s labyrinth, and now it was time to bring the hammer down. All the connections in the universe couldn’t save you when you’d bitten the hand that fed you.
I have something to show you, Rainier had said as she reeled Jules back in.
A video of Marya, bleeding off some stasis fluid—not ascension-agent, not entirely—from Lolla’s coffin. Once, twice. Never enough to make it obvious, never enough to get caught. Marya had done it every damn night until at last Jules caught her at it and moved the coffin down into the shuttle. The vials were so tiny, such hummingbird samples, but they would add up. Rainier had run calculations off the footage. By the time Jules caught Marya, she was one theft short of a viable sample. Jules knew she’d seen an air bubble in the coffin’s fluid. But she’d gotten so very good at lying to herself. Then Rainier sent Marya away.
I sent her on a mission.
A video of Marya skipping her assignment to take another shuttle, not ordained by Rainier, to a small station in orbit around one of the asteroids in Ordinal’s belt. Glitchy footage, as satellites that should not be Rainier’s turned to watch, briefly, as the woman docked her shuttle there. Then cuts to the inside as Marya, carrying a virus—Rainier, Rainier is a virus—on her wristpad into the station where Rainier slid like silk into their security, turned their own cameras against them.
Celebration. Youthful friends with bright eyes and brighter grins toasting Marya’s ability to steal fire from the gods. Her cunning in being “useful” to Rainier, as the daughter of a Keeper, showing her only things she thought Rainier could not use, to get close. Close enough to steal the secret that kept some Keepers walking through the centuries. Jules had wondered where Marya wore all those pretty clothes.
But it hadn’t been enough, the trickles of ascension-agent Marya had stolen. Once more. Marya had to go back one more time into Janus and pretend to be Rainier’s creature, desperate for immortality. She would return. She would pretend to be Jules’s friend, make nice with the broken girl from the Grotta so that Jules would show her where she’d hidden Lolla.
Then her friends would have a large enough sample to homebrew their own ascension-agent. But then Sanda had come, interrupting her plans, and as Janus tore itself apart, Marya had deployed all the evac pods, condemning Jules to death.
Marya had never wanted to “talk” with Jules. She’d wanted to steal one more sample.
Prometheus’s fire was in Marya’s hands, and it was going to burn.
It should hurt, to see how Marya had played Jules. For one stupid second, Jules had thought they might have made nice. Maybe even been friends. But despite Marya’s efforts, Jules was the one who would make it out alive. That’s what she did. Survive. Not like an extremophile or a machine or anything useful or interesting. She was a parasite, clinging not to life but to purpose. Because she’d never had one of her own.
“Three minutes,” a robotized voice said.
Jules pressed the button that deployed her helmet. The sleek plates of ebon metal slid up around her face, her skull, whisper-smooth, hissing like the clearest brook across stones. Nox would have lost his mind to touch tech like this.
Jules didn’t have much left to lose.
The breach pod tore away from the guardcore ship, carrying Jules and the two other members of her GC team with her. It rattled and shook and tossed her around, but the armor cushioned every jerk. Her stomach didn’t even lurch.
Metal screamed all around her, but the helmet dampened the noise. The pod jerked one last time as it bit into the floor of the station and pushed out anchors like tiny grasping hands. Marya must know what this was. Jules considered, in the brief seconds before the door flashed green, the fear she must be feeling. That deep, belly-chilling cold that made every muscle in your body clench.
She’d fight. Marya was a fighter. But Jules had been a fighter, too, and the day she stepped into her home to find her world torn to shreds and her makeshift family half dead had been the day she’d learned it didn’t matter how hard you fought, how much you cared. There were forces in this universe that, once moved to action, could not be stopped.
There was a thin chance Marya would win this day. She and her friends might take the GC unit out. But they’d only be stalling. Waiting until Rainier came back with bigger guns and better plans, because the ascension-agent was the one thing you did not steal from Rainier. Everyone on this station was already dead. Jules included, more than likely. Her tim
eline was just a little longer.
The pod’s door opened and Jules took point on autopilot, sweeping the room they’d landed in with the laser on her rifle. A rec room. She didn’t recognize it from the videos, but there were couches and counters. Places for people to prepare food and consume it. Mundane things, torn apart. Wires lay on the ground and fizzled like dying snakes.
“Clear,” one of the GC said.
“Obtaining map,” the other said.
Rainier might have forced her way into the security systems here, but the GC liked to work with fresh data. Their own worms wriggled through the station’s thin veneer of security, following the trail of Rainier’s intrusion. In seconds they had a map thrown up on the HUD of best guesses at locations of individuals. Jules zeroed in on target alpha—Marya—with three others in a spare room toward the center of the station.
“Marya’s mine,” Jules said.
The other GC didn’t speak, or even twitch a muscle, but she could sense their discomfort. Names weren’t used in GC protocols. Jules wasn’t even supposed to be in this armor. Rainier had let her don it only because she’d claimed Jules would need every edge against Marya.
Rainier claimed a lot of things, but now Jules saw her for what she was. Saw that she desired nothing more than for humanity to hurt itself as much as she hurt. That’s what the armor and Janus and the carrot of Lolla were all for. To crush Jules. To hurt. It had probably made Rainier’s day when Jules had been forced to turn Nox and Arden away.
But Rainier was going to learn Jules had a lot of practice at weaponizing her pain.
“Understood,” the two GC chorused, arriving at the same conclusion at the same time, as their training dictated. They’d already decided to treat Jules as a fleetie, not a proper GC, and that was fine with her.
“Mop up,” Jules ordered.
Maybe she should have felt guilty about that. She didn’t. The greed of these people had put Lolla’s safety at risk by siphoning off her stasis fluid.
Jules followed the map. She was intercepted, fire from blasters and guns glancing off her armor, going wide, or misfiring altogether. The people who fired those shots were irrelevant.
She squeezed off return fire, watched the bodies sink to the ground, and stepped over them. A trail of bloody chest wounds bloomed in her wake. Center-mass shots. Jules never missed those.
The virus in the station’s system dilated all the doors at once, leaving no blind corners, no places to hide. Jules found Marya in the exact spot the map had predicted, hunkered down, her three friends fanned out around her, showering the open door with gunfire the second Jules appeared.
Jules cut them down, one by one, and left Marya crouching behind a pile of crates in the center of the room. Storage, maybe. It didn’t matter. They had orders to slag the whole thing when they were done and crash it into the asteroid it orbited.
“Fucking shoot me,” Marya demanded.
She stood up, making her chest a clear shot, and threw her rifle to the ground. Chin high, eyes bright with anger and tears, her hands shaking but her feet planted. Jules paused, taking in the loose jeans hanging over her mag boots and the maroon tank top woven with gold-colored glitter. When had she last seen another person in street clothes? When was the last time her world wasn’t filled with Prime jumpsuits, GC armor, and white lab coats?
When was the last time she saw people? Janus. And Janus had broken.
Jules retracted her helmet.
“You don’t wear that armor,” Marya said, her voice shaking.
“I do now.”
Her lips trembled, but she pulled them into a sneer all the same. “Is this what it does? The agent? Does it turn you into her automaton, or were you always this malleable?”
“I don’t know,” Jules said, honestly. Marya’s smug bullshit had rankled her for so long, it was a strange sensation to feel… nothing… as Marya snorted and postured.
But this time Marya wasn’t posturing. Though her body was tense with fear, a flash of pity shot through her expression. “You really don’t know. She’s been priming you for this for a long, long time.”
Jules frowned. “You stole the agent. You risked Lolla’s life.”
“Is that the girl’s name? I never took much, and never all at once. Drops here and there. I didn’t mean to hurt the girl, I just wanted what you had. Strength, immortality. Who wouldn’t want those things?”
“You admit it?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe I did it.”
True, but somehow she had needed to hear the words from Marya’s lips. Needed to solidify her reason, her purpose here.
“Rainier didn’t think you’d have the guts to kill one of your own,” Marya said. “She was numbing you to it. To killing.”
“You’re not one of mine,” Jules snapped, grip tightening on the rifle. Dimly, she was aware of gunfire, shouting in the halls. She didn’t have time for this conversation.
“Does your head hurt yet?”
“What?” A dull thread started up in the back of her mind.
Marya grinned fiercely. “I designed this station like Liao’s fringer settlement. Do you see it?”
The hallways looked like tunnels boring down into rock, the doors and rooms in the same style, but that was normal—everything was standard-issue, right off a Prime Inventive assembly line. But that ache was growing stronger.
“You can’t fight if the memories are coming back so hard and fast you can’t see straight. You remember, don’t you? Remember what you did when we collected Liao. What you’ve done dozens of times without me with you.”
More screaming in the halls, but this time the shouts were far away, bubbling up out of memory. Pleading and shouting and return fire, but not here. From another time. Jules grimaced and pressed her hand against the side of her head.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she hissed.
“Pissing off the professional killer.” Marya tapped her wristpad, and for a second Jules saw real contrition cross her features. “Sorry.”
The surrounding room, so plain before, came to life with footage recorded from a helmet cam. Scenes from Liao’s fringer settlement wrapped the metal walls, but they were not as Jules remembered them.
Jules had ordered stunners. She was so fucking sure she’d ordered stunners. But there she was, through Marya’s cam, mowing down civilians with her rifle. Center-mass shots one after the other. Old, young; armed, unarmed. It did not matter. All who skittered across Jules’s path fell to the steady repeat of her rifle.
Fake footage. Marya had access to the same software they all did, and they’d faked plenty of video to convince the new intakes of their hiring stories. It must be fake.
And yet with every body that fell, Jules’s head screamed louder.
But she knew, didn’t she? She’d always known. Every time she went out on a mission and came back with a new headache. Every time she’d woken up wearing bruises she didn’t remember earning. The memory rollback came with headaches, and she accepted them, because it was the only way she could live with herself. The pain ebbed.
“Did you think Rainier tricked me into doing those things?” Jules gestured to the footage playing out across the walls. Not fake. Just memories. And they hurt less, now. Hurt less in so very many ways. “Did you think she pulled my cellular strings to make me pull the trigger?”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.” The smug triumph faded from Marya’s face. Jules took no joy in that.
“I made a promise. A promise to save one person. The rest…” Jules let her gaze track over the footage, felt the pain burning in her skull, but found she could ignore it. “… are irrelevant.”
“If you were so willing, then why the memory rollbacks? Why did she force you to forget?”
“Marya, I gave the rollbacks to myself.”
She put a bullet in Marya’s chest and felt nothing as she watched the woman fall.
Jules put her helmet back up and slung her rifle over her sho
ulder. Rainier would slag this station in ten minutes to make sure no traces of the ascension-agent remained. Jules had a lot of work to do. Her HUD had predicted that the stolen vial of ascension-agent would be on Marya’s person, but Jules found it in the top drawer of a desk, the lock easily broken.
It was so small in her hand, and still lacking, but Jules had hidden Lolla away again. This time, in a place where Rainier could not find her. Jules could provide the final drops needed to increase the quantity to amounts that the duplicators on board guardcore ships needed to manufacture more. She wouldn’t need much to achieve her goal, to motivate the scientists of the worlds into fixing Lolla. If Rainier didn’t care about biological matters, then Jules would find someone who would.
Guardcore rifles pierced guardcore armor. With deliberate care, she put a bullet in each GC’s head.
CHAPTER 71
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
NOBODY’S MASCOT
Nox found Sanda sitting alone in the room that Bero had carved out for their makeshift armory. She sat on a bench, a piece of Prime armor—a shoulder pad—between her hands, turning it over slowly. Bero had, wisely, decided she wanted to be left alone on the long trip to Liao’s fringer settlement, and stopped trying to needle her into conversation. Nox didn’t have any such qualms.
“Busted?” he asked, and plopped down next to her, stretching his legs out in front of him.
“No. I checked all the equipment, nothing’s broken. We’ve got armor for all of us plus four, and enough weapons to arm a battalion, but we’ll run out of bullets eventually.”
“Then we switch to the blasters.”
“Not as many of those. The Light can charge them without draining the engines, but we’ve got one each. If one breaks, or is lost, we’re down a gun-hand.”
“If Liao’s carrying a weapon, shit’s gotten real. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Her smile was tight. “It’s my job to worry about logistics.”
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