“I should have come sooner” was all he could say, not daring to lift his eyes from the scuffed SynthWood floor.
Graham put a hand over his, still resting on Graham’s knee, and squeezed. “You’ve been busy.”
“Making impassioned speeches to all of Prime,” Ilan said, boastful, and when Biran dared to look up, Ilan’s eyes were wide with pride and something else—something desperate. “Does the convoy have any information on the surviving pods yet?”
Translation: Are they going to bring our girl, our rock, home?
“I don’t know… It’s complicated.”
Biran looked at Graham—Ilan wouldn’t be able to hide his disappointment—and caught a hint of a knowing frown, something in his old man’s past cluing him in to pieces of what might be going on behind the scenes.
“Is there anything we can do?” Ilan asked, wringing his hands together.
“Tell me about it,” Graham said. “What you can, at any rate.”
“I…” He swallowed a lump. Graham flicked a hand at Ilan, who scurried off to see to the chili. Warm, spicy aromas wafted from the kitchen anew as he stirred the pot and came back with a thick mug of sweet coffee. Ilan deposited it on the table, kissed Biran’s head, then went back to his kitchen while Graham sat perfectly still, pressing Biran’s hand but not trapping it. He wanted to weep from the comfort of it all.
“I made a mistake,” he whispered. “I acted on incomplete information. I put people in danger.”
“The convoy?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Before that. I’m afraid… I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake that large again.”
Inferences chased themselves across Graham’s face, the disparate pieces of information clashing together, warring with one another. Biran knew his father was trying to puzzle out just what he meant—what it meant for Sanda. He also realized—must realize—that Biran would have elaborated if he could have. The desire to tell them everything was a physical ache in his chest. Why had he come here? How could he unburden himself if he could only share partial information? How could he lay so many questions at his father’s feet and walk away without answering any of them?
“Did you mean to?” Graham asked, startling Biran out of his downward spiral. Biran blinked at him, trying to focus.
“Mean to what?”
“Make a mistake.”
“You can’t plan to make a mistake, Dad.”
“Then stop being so hard on yourself, idiot.”
Biran snort-laughed, the release so sudden that something shook loose within him and warm tears flushed their way down his cheeks. Graham grumbled something incoherent and dragged his thumb across both of Biran’s cheeks, wiping the tears on his ratty pajama pants. “Got yourself too locked down, lad.”
“Nature of the job.”
Graham squinted at the living room’s picture window, and though the curtains were pulled, he looked as if he were staring straight through the fabric, the glass, even the dome of Ada to the station orbiting somewhere above—and Biran’s bosses within.
“You got friends up there? People you can talk to—honestly?” People in the loop, he meant. People who could hear classified information and be trusted.
“Friends?” He scoffed. “In that viper’s nest?”
Graham gave him a long, heavy look. “Somebody told you about those lights.”
Anaia. Dios, he’d been such an ass to lump her in with the others just because she’d cozied up to Lili. But to get too close to her now would open her up to suspicion from his superiors. If they knew where his friendly ears were, they’d have leverage. The thought chilled him. He’d never considered that the Protectorate would want leverage against him. How had things gotten so screwed, so quickly? How had he become the dissenting voice in the organization he loved?
Because it’d never been that organization. It’d been a farce—a face—a public-soothing construction.
The realization didn’t bother him. It… eased him, somehow. Released the tension from his shoulders and cooled the sourness that’d roiled his belly ever since Director Olver had rebuked his evidence that there were green lights in the rubble field.
If that organization, the one he’d been raised to love and revere, had never been, then he wasn’t betraying it. Could not, by definition, turn his back on something that hadn’t existed.
And if it hadn’t existed in the way he had thought, then that left a hole in the society he loved. But a void could be filled, repaired. Maybe he could create the organization he believed in. If he worked hard enough, and gathered allies, change might be possible. Lavaux was already frustrated with the state of things. Surely he would want to help Biran reshape the ossified system that’d precipitated into a shell around Biran’s ideal.
“He been quiet this whole time?” Ilan asked, flopping onto the couch and splaying his arms over the back and corner armrest.
“Yup. Five minutes now,” Graham said, chuckling as Biran blinked back into the moment and stared at his father, wide-eyed with admiration. “But it looks like it was a productive silence.”
“How’d you do that?” Biran asked, reaching up to rub the back of his neck where the Keeper chip was implanted.
“Sit quietly while you ruminated?”
“No. Answer my worries without knowing what they are?”
Graham quirked a smile. “Who says I didn’t know? I can read your face like a broadcast, Little B.”
The nickname sunk his lifting heart. Sanda had coined that name—little brother, little Biran, Little B—and his fathers rarely used it. Graham caught his falling heart by ruffling his hair and patting him, hard, on the back. “There. You get back up there, and you make the world you want.”
“But you’re going to eat first!” Ilan sprang to his feet and grabbed Biran by both hands, sweeping him along to the kitchen before he could protest. “There’s no reshaping a government on an empty stomach.”
He’d stocked the house for doomsday. Dozens and dozens of jars of preserved jellies, jams, sauces, and pickled vegetables of all kinds crammed the shelves inset on the wall so full that the resilient SynthWood bowed in the middle from all the weight. Biran froze at the sight, not understanding, until Graham’s hand alighted upon his shoulder and he whispered, just for the two of them.
“Cooking’s how he copes.”
Biran nodded, shakily, snapping back into himself as Ilan flew through the kitchen, clattering cabinets as he dug out bowls.
Biran took his seat at the battered old table, his back to the kitchen and his eyes to the stubby bay window that looked out over their sleepy little street. Graham and Ilan sat at opposite heads of the table, thumping heavy bowls laden with steaming chili in front of them all. All, save the seat with its back to the window.
The view out that window was wrong. He’d never seen so much of it before—so much of the skyline, the street, the air, the… bits always hidden behind Sanda’s broad-shouldered body. Her ponytail flipping here and there—obscuring first a tree, then a cool autocar he wanted to see drive by but her face would turn just right to block the view.
He could see all of that view, now. The autos and the trees and the constellation of city lights. But they were dull, lifeless. Not worth seeing without Sanda’s brightness obscuring the view.
It didn’t occur to him until the shuttle ride home to wonder how Graham coped.
CHAPTER 18
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
IN A SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
More than tumbledown warehouses peppered the edge of the Grotta. Bars—real throwbacks with flesh-and-bone bartenders and dirty glasses—sprouted throughout the desolation like wild seeds, taking advantage of the low rent and lower morals of the residents. A couple of them attracted the rich from the city proper, slick young things trying to look rough around the edges, betrayed by the perfect placement of the rips in their jeans.
Universe wasn’t one of those bars.
Jules wouldn’t even come here if the pours
weren’t heavy and the owner, Tragger, didn’t look the other way about his clientele. Couldn’t look at him straight on, anyway. Man had a glass eye he could afford to fix but refused to. Said it gave him character. Jules suspected he liked that you could never quite tell just where, exactly, he was looking. He had an eye patch over it tonight. Must have gotten the thing infected again.
Harlan led them to the bar, putting on his biggest-bad-in-the-room walk, and those few barflies Jules didn’t recognize scattered from the counter for the safety of shadowed tables. The regulars stayed put. They never left their corners. Never even looked up when Jules and her crew entered. If they had names, Jules didn’t know them, and chances were good they’d forgotten them long ago, anyway. Only value they had left in life was the number of their credit line, bleeding their basic income away into Tragger’s pockets.
Maybe they had apartments, maybe even ate solid food sometime, but here they were just siphons. In goes the booze, out goes the money. Repeat until death. Couldn’t even tell their ages. When Jules was younger, she fancied one of them might be her father—and what a story would that make? Her making the unlikely discovery, tears in her long-lost dad’s eyes as she introduced herself and set on the long path of getting him on the straight and narrow. Maybe even get a dog, or something.
She’d never been good at fantasies.
Jules plopped onto a stool and swiveled round to find Tragger already pouring out a heavy slug of grot—the local moonshine of the Grotta diluted with roasted black tea—into an almost clean glass. Must be feeling generous tonight.
“To a successful op!” Lolla cheered and raised her glass to clink with the others.
Nox, ever one to embrace a good mood, scooted his stool near them and leaned over into a conspiratorial huddle. “We going to talk about that corpse?”
Tragger cleared his throat loudly and walked to the other end of the bar.
“No,” Harlan said, swirling his glass so hard a bit splashed out over his hand. “Nothing to talk about.”
“Corpses are pretty big topics of conversation, despite their own reticence.” Nox swallowed half his glass in one long gulp.
“That corpse is old news. No one saw us. No mess. A clean in and out, despite the detour. Nothing to talk about aside from where we’ll hit next.”
“I’m… not so sure about that.” Jules took a fortifying sip as all eyes swiveled to her. She wished they’d stop staring at her like that, all narrow-eyed like they simultaneously hoped she had answers to their questions and were getting ready to disbelieve anything she was about to say. “Look, that guy was just a runner. Definitely one of the three I saw moving the stash. Why bother killing a runner?”
“’Cause they did something stupid, like sticking their nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
“I’m just saying.” Jules put her glass down and leaned forward. “That lab had something bigger going on than what we expected, right? What if it was… I don’t know, some kind of trap?”
“A trap? For us?” Lolla’s voice squeaked.
“We keep our heads down.” Harlan glanced around the room and dropped his voice. “Which is why we never should have gone through that lab.”
“Fastest way out.” Jules snapped out the words. The adrenaline of the night scraped at her nerves. She needed to calm herself down if she wanted them to listen to her.
“She’s right,” Nox cut in, giving her a chance to gather herself. “And anyway, weren’t any cameras. We set off some kind of motion thing but no one was there. Just a bunch of hocus pocus to scare us.”
“Except for the corpse,” Jules mumbled. “Wasn’t scared to death, was he?”
“Could have a bum ticker,” Nox said.
“Don’t be stupid. Look, when I went back in, it was all locked up but there were a few things out. I think they were manufacturing wraith mother in there.”
Nox’s eyebrows shot up. “You sure about that?”
Her cut fingers, the cool, foggy liquid dripping across her open wounds and mingling with her blood—flashing before it absorbed, or evaporated. The rising sense of euphoria, of vitality coursing through her veins. Yeah. She was sure. She just wasn’t sure she wanted them to know she’d been so clumsy. Or that she might be high right now.
“I know what I saw,” she said instead.
“You grabbed smartboards, right? Let me see them.” Lolla held her hand out while Harlan glared at her over the rim of his glass. Well, fuck him. She’d run that op well—and maybe even got them a bigger payday than moving wraith would allow. Shit, if they were real lucky, they might even be able to frequent a bar not in the Grotta. Though they’d probably have to get some new clothes first.
She reached into her bag and rummaged for the tablet-sized boards. Her fingers hit the three of them, hastily crammed together into a back pocket, and a thought occurred to her—Harlan could take them. Would take them, if there was anything he didn’t like on them. So she pulled out two and moved the bag around to her back before anyone could notice the leftover weight.
“Everything was locked up tight except these,” she said as she handed the boards over to Lolla. “Must have just missed whoever was working on them.”
“Could have been the corpse,” Nox threw in.
“You think a runner was working up chemicals in some lab?” Jules asked.
“He was dead awhile, anyway,” Lolla said distractedly, flipping through what she could access on the surface of the boards.
“Right. So our friends were stepping over a corpse for the past couple days to get in and out, and no one thought to clean up the mess?” Nox frowned. “I don’t like this.”
“Could have been going out the cargo load, same way we did,” Jules offered, but even she wasn’t convinced, and the withering glare Harlan gave her shut her up. She couldn’t argue with him if she was coming up with nonsense like that.
“Guys,” Lolla said in a harsh whisper, “this isn’t wraith.”
“What is it?” Harlan asked, peering over the girl’s shoulder.
“It looks like some kind of tech… they’re working on a kind of, I don’t know, neural interface? I’d have to see more to be sure.”
“Great.” Nox slouched and threw his elbows over the back of the chair. “We raided the dive lab of some shitty start-up. What a score.”
“Doesn’t explain the body,” Lolla pointed out.
“Hold up.” Jules set her drink down and pulled up an app on her wristpad. “I took some pics of the big board before I bolted. Any of this help?”
She contorted so that Lolla could see the slightly blurry images splashed across her display. The girl’s brows knotted as she pinched and zoomed on a few of them. She went pale as a ghost.
“Oh. That’s… I know these materials…”
“Well? What is it?”
Lolla dropped her voice so low Jules thought she couldn’t possibly have heard right at first.
“They’re all nonreactive, miniMRI compatible. There’s only one reason you’d bother with materials like that in a chip, and that’s if you plan on scanning it on the regular. That’s a Keeper chip.”
“How the hell do you know all that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Only the Keepers bother going through the hassle of making tech out of nonreactive materials for their miniMRIs. Waste of time and money for anyone else.”
Her stomach dropped. “Keepers like… like Prime and all that?”
“Know of any other Keepers?” Nox hissed. “I guess that explains our corpse?”
“Does it?” Jules fixated on the blurry image of the chip Lolla had zoomed in on, trying to make sense of the various diagrams.
“Who’s got the power to make a corpse and cover it up? Prime, that’s who.”
“Prime’s also got the money and the power to set up a proper facility, not hang out in a rotten husk at the edge of the Grotta. Can’t be them.”
“Unless one of them was doing something they didn’t want the others to know abo
ut,” Nox said.
“This,” Harlan said into all their slack expressions, “is so fucking beyond us.”
Jules foundered for a moment, then pulled her thoughts together. “If there’s a rogue Keeper, the rest are going to want to know about it.”
“Shit. What are you going to do? Go to the cops and tell them you just happened to stumble across a secret Keeper lab while heisting some wraith? They’d lock you in the loony ward faster than you could spit.”
“No, no, fuck the cops. I’m thinking… I’m thinking we do a little digging, find out who’s using that lab. Then we make them think we’re going to go to the cops.”
“You want to blackmail a rogue Keeper.” Nox whistled low. “Got bigger balls than me, girl.”
Harlan snatched the boards from Lolla’s hands and shoved them into the interior pocket on his jacket, not bothering to lock the screens.
“This is insanity. Forget you ever saw this—all of you. We’re going to factory reset these devices, sell them for the price of the hardware, throw that credit in the wraith pile, and call it a day. Understand? We’re not fucking with Keepers.” He dropped his voice so low on the last word it came out as a growl.
Jules made a lunge for the boards but he swatted her back. “Those are mine to do with as I please.”
“Not anymore, kid. You just got robbed. Tough luck.”
“When did you get so damned cowardly?”
He loomed toward her. Bloodshot spiderwebs reached across yellowed sclera, the dark ring around his once vibrant grey eyes long since faded with his youth. Wrinkles—a rarity outside the strangled lives of the Grotta—lined his lips and punctuated those tired eyes.
“It’s not cowardice, Jules Valentine. It’s staying in your lane. Knowing how high you can pick your head up before it gets chopped off. People in this world, they don’t give a shit about the likes of us. Not the people in the Grotta, not the people in the city proper, and not the elites on station or up the hills. Sure as hell not the Keepers. You ever met a Prime employee who didn’t look down their nose at you? I’m not talking Keepers or diplomats—I’m talking their starfucked janitors, their receptionists. It’s not even a secret to the credit-strapped sop who makes their sandwiches that we’re beneath them. You can’t play in that pool, girl. They don’t want you. Keep sticking your head up in their space, and they’ll push it down so hard you drown. Understand?”
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