by Pierce Brown
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
I’m sick of waiting. Sick of the carousel of thoughts in my brain. I stare at the watch, willing the hands forward on their cheap gears that lose seconds every day. Can’t think of anything but a ghost and how each tick, each tock, takes me farther from him. Farther from the ridiculous slicked-back hair he wore because he thought it made him look like a holostar I liked, or the knockoff Duverchi jackets he’d wear thinking it hid the farmboy underneath. That was his problem—always trying to be something he wasn’t. Always trying to be more. Ate him up in the end and spat him out.
I pull my zoladone dispenser from my pack. I thumb the silver cylinder and it dispenses a black pill the size of a rat’s pupil into my hand. Particularly wicked new designer drug. Absurdly illegal. Jacks up your dopamine and suppresses activity in the bit of gray matter responsible for empathy. Spec ops teams ate Zs like candy during the Battle of Luna. If you have to melt a city block, it’s better to save the tears till you’re back in your bunk.
I keep the dose low. One milligram worth of emotion-numbing molecules lances through my blood. The thoughts of my fiancé lose their dimensionality, becoming nothing but flat, monochrome pictures in a faded memory.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Beep.
Shine time. I click my com once. Three more clicks echo.
Then there’s a grating sound from the stone. It begins to move on its own. Blue light from the warehouse overheads seeps through the cracks as the lid of the sarcophagus levitates. A dark mass stands above me, holding the stone lid in the air as if it were made of neoPlast.
“Evening, Volga,” I mouth in gratitude to the giant woman. I sit up and feel a series of satisfying pops as my spinal cord stretches. Half my age, my Obsidian accomplice smiles with a mouth mangled by second-rate dental work. Unlike ice Obsidians, her face is absent the dense wind calluses that usually hide the sloping of cheekbones. Volga’s small for an Obsidian, lean and a stunted six and a half feet. It makes her look less threatening than the average crow. It’s not what her makers intended. She was born in a lab, courtesy of a Society breeding program. Poor kid didn’t measure up with the rest of the crop and was tossed down to Earth for slave labor.
Met her five years back at a loading dock outside Echo City. I had delivered an item to a collector and had to celebrate with a few cocktails. Volga found me ten drinks and two centimeters deep in a pool of my own blood in an alley, mugged, cut, and left for dead by two local blackteeth. She carried me to a hospital and I paid her back with a ride to Luna, the one place she really wanted to go. Been following me around ever since. Teaching her the trade is my own little pet project.
Like me, she wears a black neoPlast suit to hide her thermal signature. She’s still holding the lid of the sarcophagus above my head in the gloom of the museum’s warehouse.
“You can stop showing off now,” I mutter.
“Do not be jealous, tiny man, that I can lift what you cannot lift.”
“Shhh. Don’t bark so damn loud.”
She winces. “Sorry. I thought Cyra turned off the security system.”
“Just shut up,” I say irritably. “Don’t skip in a minefield.” The old legion adage makes me feel even older than does the old ache in my right knee.
“Yes, boss.” She makes an embarrassed face and sets the stone down gently before extending a hand to lift me out. I groan. Even with the Z, I feel every drink and snort and puff of my forty-six years. I blame the legion for stealing a good quarter of them. The Rising for stealing three more before I wised up and split. And then myself for spending all the rest like there’d be more coming at the end of the rainbow.
I don’t need a mirror to tell me I’m the secondhand model of myself. I’ve got the telltale swollen face of a man who’s gone one too many rounds with the bottle, and a slight body even a decade in legion gravity gymnasiums couldn’t broaden.
I gather the green wrappers from my dinner of sirloin cubes and Venusian ginger seaweed and spray an aerosol can of blackmarket DNA into the sarcophagus before stuffing the can and the garbage into my backpack. Up goes my bodysuit’s facial hood and I motion to Volga to don hers. We find the other two members of my team past a stack of crates four meters high, crouched in front of the security door leading out of the warehouse.
“Top of the evening,” my team’s cat, Dano, a young, pimply Red, says without looking back. “Could hear your knees creaking from a hundred meters, Tinman. Need some street grease in them. I know a louse at a chop shop who’ll do you good.”
I ignore him and his Terran overfamiliarity.
I need more Lunese associates. Hell, I’d even take a grumpy Martian. Terrans are all such talkers.
My Green locksmith, Cyra, another Terran, is on a knee working the interior of the biometric lock. Her gear is set out on the floor near the door, where she’ll run support. Bit twitchy, that one. She doesn’t usually like coming to the dancefloor. I’ve hired Cyra sporadically over the past few years, but we’re not close. She’s like most Limies—petulant and selfish, with a processor in place of a heart. Especially nasty to Volga. Doesn’t bother me. I came to the conclusion at the age of nine that most people are liars, bastards, or just plain stupid. She’s a good hacker, and that’s all I care about. There’s few enough of them freelancing these days. Corporations, criminal and reputable alike, are gobbling up all the talent.
Both Cyra and Dano are short, and the only way to tell them apart in their hooded black bodysuits is the sizable paunch around Cyra’s midsection, that and the fact that Dano is doing the splits stretching for his part in the play, and humming an asinine Red ditty to himself.
I mind Dano less than Cyra. I’ve known him since he was a street rat fresh off the boat from Earth, pickpocketing on the Promenade with more acne on his face than hair in his head.
Cyra’s hands work the innards of the door, her left holding an output jack that transmits a wireless signal from the door to the hardware in her head. Two metal crescents packed with hardware and two hardline uplinks embedded in her skull run from her temples, over her ears, and back toward the base of her cranium. I see their bulge from underneath her thermal hood.
“Door alarm?” I ask, when she leans back from the door.
“Off, obviously,” she snaps, voice muffled through the hood. “The magnetic seal is dead.” She glances over at Volga, who has kneeled to unfold her compact assault rifle from its black case. “Planning to break your rule tonight, crow?”
“Wait, are we murder positive?” Dano asks eagerly.
“No. We’re not breaking any rules,” I reply. “But if chance strikes, the pale lady is my walking, talking insurance policy. You know what they say. Hell hath no fury like a woman packing a railgun.” Volga’s gloved hands assemble the black weapon. She pulls free three curved clips of ammunition and attaches them to the outside of her suit with bonding tape. Each clip is marked with a colored band coordinating with the type of projectile—venom paralytic, electrical disrupter, hallucinogenic round. Never killing rounds. Damn inconvenient having a killing-machine bodyguard who refuses to kill.
I’ve no such reservations. I touch the pistol on my own hip, making sure the leg holster is tight. Muscle reflex by this point. I look back at Cyra. “You going to make me ask about the rest of the alarms?”
“Limey couldn’t get all of ’em,” Dano says from the ground where he contorts his leg behind his head in a bizarre hamstring stretch.
“That right?”
“Yeah,” Cyra mutters.
Dano looks over at me, his face hidden behind the tight black plastic of his thermal. “Told you we shoulda hired Geratrix.”
“Geratrix is Syndicate now,” I mutter.
Dano bows his head in mock sorrow. “Another one for the bloody black.”
“It’s not my fault,” Cyra says in a low voice. “They updated their system. New protocols are government. Would take me near thirty minutes to punch in. Shit, it’d take a team of Republ
ic astral hackers at least twelve—”
I hold up a hand. “Hear that?” I whisper. They listen. “That’s the sound of your take getting cut in half.”
“Half?”
“Half a job, half pay.”
Cyra’s got a temper on her as short as a tick’s tooth. Her hand drops to the multigun on her hip. Still, Volga takes one step toward her and Cyra looks like a kitten hearing thunder. I bend on a knee in front of the Green. “It’s not my fault…” she says. I take her chin through the mask and guide it so she’s looking at me.
“Calm down, and tell me the problem.” I snap my fingers. “Today, pissant.”
“I can’t access the Conquerors Exhibit systems,” she admits.
“At all?”
“It’s on an isolated server. Real relics in there, real security.”
I feel a spasm of annoyance in my left eyelid. Damn. Dano’s gonna have to do some acrobatics. “You know how I hate surprises, Cyra….”
“Told you we shoulda bought the gravBelts,” Dano says.
“Say ‘I told you we shoulda’ one more time. See what happens.” He meets my eyes, then glances down at the floor. Thought so. “Spider gloves are good enough,” I say. “Recyclers on.” Dano, Volga, and I pull our recyclers from our bags and strap them over our thermals’ mouth holes. “I trust you still have the doors figured….”
She nods.
“Thirty seconds in each room,” I remind them as Volga slings her gun on her back and approaches the door. Dano rolls up from his stretch and Volga pushes a large flat magnet against the door. It makes a dull thump as it locks onto the metal. We stare at the magnet as its sound reverberates. Through the door our voices won’t be heard, but that might have been. I look to Cyra. She shakes her head. Decibel levels were too low. Clear, Volga wraps her massive mitts around the handle.
My body welcomes the adrenaline, sucking it down like water on cracked asphalt. I look at the watch and feel nothing. My focus narrows to the here and now. I grin.
“No one better sprain their fucking ankle,” I say, warming up my legs. “Go on, V. Shine time.” Volga heaves on the door, rolling it back into the wall.
“And grid one is down,” Cyra says quietly into our coms. Dano goes first into the hall on sound-dampening shoes. I go next and look to see if Volga’s following. She’s right behind me, freakishly silent despite her size. Cyra stays behind, monitoring the security systems and the guard level.
Down a narrow staff corridor lies another heavy security door. “Hold,” Cyra says. “Grid two is down. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…” Volga puts a mechanical lever under the door and activates it. The heavy door slides upward, jolting along with the lever. We shimmy under the door. A painting of a furious warhorse strapped to a chariot is suspended mid-stride from the ceiling. In the chariot is an archer firing at men in bronze armor and horsehair helms. I stand quickly to look around the vast room. Weeping stone children peer down from the floral columns. Great frescoes explode with color along marble walls. Soon the floor pressure sensors, cameras, and lasers will come back on.
“Twenty.”
A sense of nostalgia sweeps over me as we run across the floor. Seems just yesterday I was here as a legion pledge. I remember boarding the tram to come to the city center wearing the winged pyramid pin they give us, puffing my chest out when highColors would nod to me or lowColors would step out of my path. Stupid kid. He thought that pin made him a man. It just made him a pet. And nowadays it’ll get you scalped.
“Eight. Seven…”
After three more halls and a stitch in my side later as I try to keep up with my younger crew, we reach the Conquerors Exhibit, where we prop open the door with the lever and shimmy under. Carefully, we stand on a narrow slip of metal, just shy of the marble floor that has the inbuilt pressure sensors.
The room is as domineering as its subjects. Built by enraptured Golds to honor their psychotic ancestors who conquered Earth, it is grand and brutal, and unchanged by the Republic except for a few modifications. They’ve included a list of the conquered amongst the conquerors. Representations of pre-Color humans stand beside casualty statistics. One hundred and ten million died for Gold to rule. Then their bombers dropped solocene into the troposphere and neutered an entire race. Didn’t even have to convert them to the Color hierarchy. Just had to wait a century for them to die out. Bloodless genocide. Give one thing to the Conquerors. They were efficient.
Pricks.
At the center of the exhibit, under a stone archway with the legend CONQUERORS EXHIBIT, twenty ancient Ionic columns line an ascending stairway. At the top, a Delphic temple sits, and inside that, past priceless relics encased in duroglass, lies the object of my collector’s desire. It is a sword of the first overlord, a razor belonging to the great bastard, hero of the Conquerors, Silenius au Lune. The Lightbringer.
“That don’t look so scary,” Dano said when we first got the contract.
I smiled and nodded to Volga. “What if she were holding it?”
“She’d look scary waving a bloodydamn muffin.”
“If I had a muffin, I would eat it,” Volga said.
The blade sits behind two fingers of duroglass and is on loan to the museum from a private collector for only one week longer. Liberation Day is a perfect time for it to go missing. Volga and I scan the ceiling of the exhibit, looking for the telltale sign of a drone garage. We see it in the top left corner of the room, a small titanium flap built into the marble. I nod to Volga, and she slips on her spider gloves and jumps onto the wall. They stick to the marble and she crawls along the wall till she’s hanging beneath the garage door. She pulls four laser nodes from her pack and puts them on either side of the door and activates them. Two green lasers crisscross over the door. She gives me an eager thumbs-up and looks for more garages.
I nudge Dano. He’s up.
The boy does an ironic two-step dance on the narrow slip of the doorframe, jumps up onto the wall with his spider gloves, then pushes off with his legs, backflipping onto a glass case holding a Gold war helmet. He catches himself, turns, then leapfrogs case to case till he can jump onto one of the Ionic columns. He hits it midway up, hugs it and shimmies up. As he moves, I summon the autoflier from its garage five klicks away via my datapad. It drives autonomously through traffic toward the museum. Dano moves along the columns like some sort of human flea till he’s picked his way directly above the glass case. He lets himself fall, turning in the air so he lands on all fours in a way that makes my knees ache just to watch.
Dano stands and delivers an obnoxious bow before pulling his laser cutter from his pack. The glass glows as he cuts a circular hole into it. Then, with a triumphant smile, he plucks up the blade and holds it aloft.
The alarm goes off on schedule.
A high-pitched frequency screams out of speakers. It would shred our eardrums if we didn’t have sonic plugs. As it is, it’s little more than the annoying whine of a hungry dog. A second security door closes behind us, sealing us in. Two nodes on the ceiling lower and begin to pump disabling gas into the room. Does nothing with our recyclers running. Up high on the wall, the drone garage opens and a metal drone rips out of its hiding place, right into Volga’s laser grid. It smokes down to the floor in four pieces. A second follows and meets the same fate as she shoots out the cameras. At the windows, metal security doors fall to block us in. I stand still like a conductor at the center of his orchestra. All these variables falling into place just as I planned. And a deep, formless depression falls on me as the adrenaline fades.
“Locksmith, find your exit,” I mutter into my com.
Volga drops from her place on the wall to join me. She moves excitably, still young enough to be impressed by this. Dano hops along the columns back to the arch, where he graffities profanity with his laser drill. “The razor?” I ask.
He twirls it in his hand. It’s meant for a man twice his size. “A nasty little dick tickler.”
“The razor,” I say again.
“All right, kids.” I open the canister of custom acid and tip it onto the marble floor. “Time to go.”
THE MORNING AFTER THE HEIST, on my least favorite day of the year, I drain the vodka from my glass, waiting for the arbiter to finish his inspection. “So, is there a verdict yet?” I ask without bothering to hide my impatience. The slender man makes a show of remaining silent at the desk over which he has been hunched for the better part of an hour. It’s overdramatic White slush. Anemic assholes think it profound to feign an air of aloofness, hiding behind contracts and commerce the way spiders hide and wait behind their webs. Two hundred were sentenced to life in Deepgrave during the Hyperion Trials for their part in the Gold judicial system. Should have been ten thousand. Rest were saved by the Amnesty declared by the Sovereign.
Bored, I survey the rest of the penthouse. It is painfully tasteful, done up in the restrained ostentation popular in Luna’s upper circles—minimalist decor with rose-quartz floors and large windows that look out over the glowing nightscape. On a moon where three billion souls clamor atop each other to breathe, only the offensively rich can afford to waste space.
It reminds me of so many of the decadent flats I encountered as a high-end claims investigator for Piraeus Insurance, before the Rising. Back when I was the help.
HighColors looked down on Grays because we took out the trash. LowColors hated us because they were the trash. Everyone else feared us, because for seven hundred years we have been the all-purpose knife of the state. Obsidians? Circus freaks, the lot of ’em. Grays do work. We are adaptable, efficient, and bred for systematic loyalty. Little has changed for most of them: new masters, same collar.