by R. M. Olson
Galina stayed where she was for a few moments, face turned away, body stiff with tension. At last, though, she turned slightly, her posture drooping tiredly.
“You’re right,” she said at last, in a low voice. “I—once upon a time, a long time ago, I was here. I—I was only a kid. I didn’t know—I didn’t know what was happening to me. They didn’t tell me—” She broke off again, and for a long moment, she was quiet. At last, she said, “I was lucky. I got away.” She gave a soft, bitter laugh. Her voice was still quiet, but as hard as steel. “I got out, smuggled myself off in one of the cargo ships. I was one of the lucky ones. But there were people who took care of me, protected me. And I never came back for them. I—I was too afraid.” She turned to Ysbel, and even in the dim light, Ysbel could see the haunted look on her face. “I’ve felt guilty over that my whole life. My whole life, it’s eaten me up from the inside. The people here, in this part of the city, are trafficked—the servers, the cooks, the street cleaners, the entertainers. They’re bought and sold like damn animals. And they last about as long as animals, too.”
For a few moments, her words hung in the air. Neither of them spoke.
There was a faint sickness coating the back of Ysbel’s throat.
She’d known about the pleasure planet for as long as she could remember—she could remember as a child her mother speaking of it in hushed tones to her father. And she’d known about the trafficking. It was an open secret in the system—if you were wealthy enough, you could visit the pleasure planets as a guest. Your parents have enough bad harvests, so that they have the choice of letting one child go or letting all the children starve, or you’re a lone street kid without a gang of other kids for protection, and you end up on the pleasure planet as something else—a server, a cleaner, an entertainer. And some of these houses were notorious for having disposable entertainment.
She’d known that, ever since she was a child, and the knowledge had always sickened her. But it wasn’t until she was here, standing in the entrance to this filthy alley and looking into the sickened, guilt-ridden face of this girl that she actually realized what it meant.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, quietly. “I don’t know if this makes you feel better. But—I’m not sure many people would have come back at all.”
Galina managed a small smile. “When—when Jez told me about the rest of you, what you were doing, I—I almost ran for it. But—” she paused, closing her eyes for a moment. “But the thing is—well, the thing about Jez is, she—has this way of making you believe you can do things you never thought you could. I’ve seen her scared before. But she does it anyways. And—well, and I guess I couldn’t run away.”
“Does Jez know?” asked Ysbel quietly.
Galina nodded. “I told her, back on the casino ship. No one else knows, though. She said she wouldn’t say anything unless I wanted her to. She said I didn’t have to come, that if I wanted, I could just wait on the ship and she’d come back for me when you were all done. But—” she shook her head and managed a small smile. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let her come here, and lose my one chance to do something to make things better.”
Ysbel swallowed down something in her throat. “Well,” she said at last, “I’ve never thought of myself as a coward. But I don’t know that I would have been able to do what you’re doing right now. And don’t worry. I won’t say anything unless you want me to.”
Galina gave her another faint, grateful smile. “I’ll—tell them tomorrow. When we get back. I think Masha and Lev have probably already guessed.”
Ysbel nodded, and Galina turned back to the street in front of them.
“I guess we should get going, then,” she said. “Follow me. I know a path from here into the pleasure district.”
They walked quietly. Ysbel had spent enough of her life around Tanya to know how to get somewhere without making much noise, and Galina could be surprisingly quiet as well. They made their way through the unlit streets. Most of the bulbous artificial streetlights were broken, although here and there one gave an anemic orange flicker.
There was a large wall built around the pleasure district, but Galina led them unerringly to a small gateway. It wasn’t guarded, and when Ysbel expressed her surprise, Galina gave her a grim look. “It’s because some of the guests want to find their entertainment in the wild, they call it. If they have enough bodyguards, they don’t have much to worry about. And like I said, everyone in the slum district belongs to someone. There isn’t much they can do.”
Ysbel closed her eyes for a moment, and tried not to let Galina’s words paint a picture in her head. She wasn’t certain she would be able to get it back out again.
Stepping out of the slums and onto the streets of the pleasure district was like stepping onto a different planet. Here, the street lights were a soft gold, their lights illuminating the street as bright as day. The streets here were as busy as they’d been in the daytime, on that day months ago when Ysbel had planted an explosive in the Strani House as a distraction when they were kidnapping a weapon’s dealer to steal his identity.
Now that she thought about it, it had been a long time since she hadn’t been part of a crazy plan that would almost certainly lead to her death.
Still, she hadn’t really had the time to look around much back then, since if anyone had caught them they would have all suffered violent deaths. And alright, perhaps this wasn’t all that different, but you did become accustomed to it eventually.
Galina pulled back her hood, and was walking in a purposeful way that made people step aside for her almost unconsciously. Her long hair bounced against her back, and her clothing was just drab enough not to attract attention, and just nice enough not to attract comment.
Ysbel had never had to worry too much about that, as she found that a scowl was generally enough to inform people that staying out of her way was their best option, at least if they wanted to keep all their body parts attached. But, to each their own.
The lights of the pleasure houses glowed and flashed in bright, garish colours, and raucous laughter and shouts rang out from some of the open doorways. Galina led them quickly to a large, open park. Or at least, it looked open. As Ysbel got closer, she realized that the large maze of bushes and half-walls made it into a series of small enclosures. On a gilded bench outside the maze, a couple sat pressed together, clothing disheveled, eyes half-lidded, the sweet smell of street-drugs recognizable even from here.
Galina paused a few meters away from the entrance. “This is the place you showed me on the map.”
Ysbel studied it for a moment, frowning in thought. “Yes, but there will be people inside that.”
Galina nodded, chewing the inside of her cheek. “Maybe somewhere farther down the street. If we keep an eye out—”
From inside the structure, there was a sharp, shrill scream, abruptly cut off.
The two women exchanged grim looks, and Ysbel reached inside her jacket pocket, pulling out a small canister. She handed it to Galina. “How is your throwing arm?”
Galina frowned, face still tense. “Alright, I guess.”
“Throw this as far into the middle of that hell-hole as you can,” said Ysbel shortly. “It won’t do any permanent damage, but if anyone stays in the place after the gas starts to disperse, it will be because they’re dead.”
Galina smiled grimly. “Alright. Then what?”
Ysbel gave a small smirk. “Then you stand back. Far back, please, because I think Jez would be upset if I brought you back in pieces. I’ll give the people inside time to get out. And then—” she shrugged.
Galina gave a tight nod and started off around the other side of the park. Ysbel stood back, eyeing the place critically. She smiled to herself, and strolled over to one corner of the maze of bushes.
She’d almost finished planting her explosives when she heard the small pop, and then the hiss of releasing gas. She placed the last explosive, then straightened and wandered back towards the crowd,
keeping an eye on the maze entrance.
A few moments later, coughing, choking people began to stagger out, tears streaming down their faces.
Galina appeared a moment later, her face set and bloodless.
Ysbel sighed and handed her a mask. “Go on,” she said. “This will keep you from breathing it, anyways. I know you want to make sure they’re all out.”
“Just the entertainment,” said Galina quietly. “I don’t care about the others.” She slipped the mask over her face and stepped past the coughing people crowding the entrance to the maze. When she emerged a few minutes later, she caught Ysbel’s eye and nodded. Ysbel gestured her out of the way with a quick jerk of her head.
Already, there were the sound of police bikes whining up the streets, people clambering and shouting and backing away from the clouds of gas hanging over the park. Ysbel sighed.
As much as she’d like to wait until the scum-sucking police officers pulled their masks on and went into see what had caused the disturbance, Tanya had asked. And besides, she’d promised Lev. Still—she waited until they were close enough that the blast would at least give them a shock.
Then she hit the controller.
There was a noise that was so loud it almost ceased to be a noise and became a physical force, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the flash of white that wrote itself across the back of her eyeballs.
When she opened her eyes, the park, with it’s maze of bushes, was gone. In its place, a smoking crater opened up, and police officers, flung back by the blast, were shaking their heads and slowly pushing themselves up on their elbows.
“Ysbel,” Galina whispered, and Ysbel turned to find the girl at her elbow.
Her face was still bloodless, and she had a fierce, hard expression on her face that Ysbel had never seen there before.
Even she would hesitate to cross Galina right now.
But there was something in Galina’s face as they walked back through the slums, and something in her posture as they mounted their bikes, that made Ysbel wish she could give the girl a hug.
But then, she was fairly certain that Jez would take care of that. And that the restless, snarky pilot would somehow know what to say to Galina to make everything just a little more bearable.
CHAPTER TEN
JEZ BOUNCED ON the balls of her feet, eyes closed, fingers flexed.
“Jez? You alright?”
She looked up. Galina stood there, Lev beside her.
Jez gave Galina a grin that did nothing to hide the relief coursing through her body. “Yep. Been too long since I’ve been in my damn ship, that’s all.”
Galina smiled at her fondly. “I wanted to come see you off, at least. I’d come with you if I could. I just—they need me here.”
“I know.” Jez caught Galina’s hand and pulled her in for a long kiss that almost did the same thing to her brain the the thought of flying did. Galina’s body was soft, and her curves almost reminded Jez of her beautiful ship, and she smelled of soap and sweat and sawdust, and for a moment she wished Galya would be flying with them, so much she could taste it.
But she was right, they needed Galya here, and—well, and the fact was, if Jez couldn’t get back in the sky, she might actually go completely crazy. So at last, reluctantly, she released Galina and grinned at Lev. “You ready, genius?”
Lev sighed, a tinge of strain in his expression. “I’m ready. You?”
“Born ready,” she said, smirking at him. “Get in and strap down.”
They climbed the loading ramp, and Jez sighed in a sort of desperate relief.
There was something about stepping into her ship that made the whole world feel right again.
She slid into the familiar comfort of the pilot’s seat and rested her hands on the controls, letting the feeling of them seep up through her fingers like water into dry soil, then she hit the ignition. Lev strapped in to the copilot’s seat beside her, she touched the controls lightly, and the ship lifted gracefully off ground.
They rose smoothly out of the hangar and over the wall that surrounded their courtyard. From the corner of her eye, she saw the wary apprehension on Lev’s face turning to a sort of cautious relief. And then she hit the throttle, and the ship shot forward, flipping on its side to slide through the opening in the planet’s force-field, then streaked towards the blue-black line that marked the outside of the thin line of atmosphere that held them down.
With their hyperdrive, the trip only took an hour or so, and when she brought the ship in through atmosphere and swooped low across the evergreen forests and swamps that surrounded the city, it was close to evening.
She grinned. Perfect timing.
She’d never actually liked Prasvishoni all that much, but on days like this, with the evening sun glinting across the branches of the evergreens, lighting the frosty tips below her like a thousand sparkling stars, she couldn’t help but feel a grudging fondness for the place. Lev took a deep breath, and let go his chokehold on the arm of the copilot’s seat. “I’ll send coordinates through to your com,” he said, voice shaking only slightly. “We’ll be landing at one of the public docking bays. The shielding spoof Tae set up should stop them from tracking us.”
He paused. “Jez. You … know what you’re doing, right? I just want to go over this one more time.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “Listen, genius. If I don’t know, I’ll figure it out as I go, OK? Not like I haven’t done it before.”
Lev took a long, steadying breath. “Jez,” he said at last. “These are the government officials who’ve planned a convention on the pleasure planet. The big spenders. We need Grigory’s people to see you talking to them, and then they have to not show up at the Strani House. The second part we’ve taken care of, between Ysbel’s explosion yesterday and the fact that Tae hacked in and will cancel all their bookings tonight. But Grigory needs to believe you talked them into coming to our pleasure house instead.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re acting like I’ve never even heard of this plan.”
Lev took another long breath. “I’m sorry. So you know what you need to do.”
She shrugged. “Nah. I wasn’t actually listening to what you eggheads were talking about. But I might have been. So not like you should just assume.”
The sound of Lev sucking in a sharp breath through his nose was as familiar and comforting as the hum of a running ship.
She laughed. “Relax, genius. Yes, I know what I’m doing.”
She steered them in through the city gates, then turned towards the docking bay Lev had sent to her holoscreen. She pulled into docking bay forty-seven, and as she powered the ship down, something tightened inside her chest.
She hadn’t been in a docking bay since the last run she’d made as a smuggler. It seemed like yesterday, and a lifetime ago—when she’d been running completely free. No one to worry about, no strings, nothing but her and her ship and deep, deep space, none of this crap about saving the system or taking down the government or taking down Grigory Korzhikov.
No strings, no one to worry about.
But there’d been no one to worry about her, either.
She swallowed hard and gave a quick shake of her head.
OK, so it was different than smuggling. And yes, maybe she missed that sometimes, the freedom of it. The way she could go wherever she wanted, and do whatever she wanted.
But, well—she wouldn’t trade it, honestly.
At the entrance to the docking bay, Lev paused. He checked his heat pistol, then placed it carefully in its holster and turned to her with a grim expression on his face. “Alright, Jez, this is your plan. So. What are we doing?”
His voice said he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
She grinned. “Well, they’re expecting someone from Grigory to show up, right? So that’s what I’m going to give them.” She paused a moment to enjoy the look on his face.
“If—if you think that’s a good idea,” said Lev after a moment, in a slight
ly strangled voice.
“Damn right I do,” she said, still grinning. She checked her own pistol—well, pistols, since she had about three of them, and a couple of Ysbel’s explosives.
No point in coming to a party unprepared.
“Is that—all?” he asked, after a long breath.
She rolled her eyes. “What else do you want to know? You’re coming in as backup, so you don’t have to do anything, just sit there and tell me if someone comes in who wants to kill me. I’ll tell the government idiots I’m from Grigory, and tell them this whole thing is a bad idea and they’ll probably get blown into a million pieces if they try to come.”
“Jez. Why don’t I tell them that, and you be the backup? I spent more time with Grigory than you did, and—”
“Two reasons, genius,” she said, holstering her weapons. “First, you can’t gamble like I can. And second, you hate being shot at.”
“How—why do either of those things—”
She winked at him. “Watch and learn.” She turned, and started off down the narrow, filthy dock streets. A moment later she heard Lev’s footsteps coming after her.
“Jez,” he whispered as he caught up with her. She half-turned, prepared to argue, but he just shook his head, a tight, strained expression on his face. “Good luck,” he whispered at last. “I’ll be in the back if you need me, and I’ll be listening in on the com. I’ll give you any information I have that might be helpful.”
She almost stopped walking to stare at him.
He managed a reluctant smile. “What?”
She shook her head and turned back to the street in front of her. “You aren’t going to fight with me?”
His smile grew a little more genuine. “Well, first off, it wouldn’t change anything. And second—” he paused a moment, his voice growing quieter. “Second, you—well, your plans are mildly unconventional. But—they’ve always worked. And I supposed it’s stupid of me to argue with you over something you’ve clearly already thought through, just because it’s not how I’d do it.”