They went down the steps and into the inn’s front room only to find that the crowd was nearly at the door.
Rayet shut the door and bolted it, then closed the curtains, blocking the sight of the crowd. Their shouts continued to be heard even through the imitation wood. The crowd was so closely gathered and their lanterns were so sparsely scattered among them that Constance could discern no faces clearly. They were a shapeless, faceless, single creature, full of hate.
“Marisol will send soldiers,” Rayet said.
“They’ll come too late,” Milla said. Even when she was surrounded, her voice was calm.
“We will not shoot these people,” Constance said.
The crack of a gunshot; glass shattered, and a hole was torn in one of the window coverings. Everyone in the room ducked automatically, but the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in the opposite wall. The shouting of the crowd and the howling of the wind and the rumble of the generator all came more clearly in through the hole the gun had made.
“No,” Milla said, “but they might shoot you.”
“Out the back,” the little old woman urged.
Constance’s heart burned. “I will not crawl out a window and run away!”
“I believe you will have to,” Milla told her.
“Can’t,” said Rayet, keeping a steady crouch, out of the way of any more stray bullets. “We have a long way to go to the ship. They have guns. If they follow us, they can pick us off while we run.”
“We can’t stay here,” Milla said. “We’ll be surrounded.”
The roar of the generator cut out abruptly. It was followed by the blackening of the lights. The cheery little room was suddenly opaque.
The crowd had reached the generator.
“Maybe so,” said Rayet, a crouched shape that Constance could barely see, “but if we leave, we die.”
Milla lifted her chin. Constance saw the shape of her head dimly silhouetted in the faint light from outside but nothing more.
“Not if they don’t follow you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Constance said. She did not like the way Milla stood, the squaring of her shoulders in silhouette.
Milla said, “Those people are looking for a woman to kill. They won’t care which one.”
“No,” said Constance.
“Oh, Constance,” Milla said. “This isn’t your choice.” She said to Rayet, “Get her out of here. Carry her out of here if you need to, kicking and screaming, but get her out of here. Do not let her stay.”
“Don’t you dare touch me,” Constance said, but Rayet said, “Yes, Doctor Ivanov,” and then his arm was around her waist, lifting her up. “Let me go!”
“Get her out of here,” Milla said, and turned away from Constance as Rayet started to carry her out of the room.
The little old woman had vanished; fled, probably. She had passed on her warning; she had no more reason to stay. Constance shouted and screamed and kicked and hit Rayet’s back and twisted in his arms, but he was too strong for her. She saw Milla go to the door and open it. Milla stood for a moment silhouetted in the door of the inn and then walked out toward the roaring crowd. Constance screamed and struggled, past consideration of her own dignity, even as Rayet opened a window in the back of the house, even as he pushed her out of it and followed to grab hold of her before she could break free, even as he carried her off.
There was a roar from the crowd, a roar of satisfaction, like the rejoicing of hounds that have fallen on their kill, and although by the time they reached her shuttles Constance had regained enough presence of mind to walk on her own, in her mind she could see nothing but the flickering lights of the town and hear nothing but that dreadful roar.
Chapter 5
IRON-56
SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH
“We’re being followed,” Ivan said as he and Constance walked back to their ship from the System dispatch center, going down a narrow boulevard lined with Luna’s closely packed houses and shops. The docks were up ahead, and the Annwn had landed; there would be fewer people up there and less surveillance.
“I saw. System?” She spoke as he had spoken to her, in a murmur close to his skin, so that the cameras could see nothing of what they said.
“Probably,” Ivan said. “Not a lot of criminals around here; I doubt they’re trying to rob us.”
The con had gone smoothly. Ivan had chatted with the dispatcher, keeping him charmed and just distracted enough that the Hertzsprung ended up where it needed to go. No alarms had been raised, which meant that Mattie had not been found and the bombs had not been noticed. Whatever happened now was out of her hands: she had to trust Julian to succeed.
Ivan said, “They’ve got a positive identification on me if they’re following us. And through the cameras they’ve seen us come in and out of the Annwn, so they know where our ship is.”
The moon had swung around to face the sun while they were in the dispatch room; the sun gleamed through the atmospheric dome with a pale and brilliant light. Adrenaline prickled under Constance’s skin. “So we’re caught. Once we’re in the docks, they’ll fire.”
“Not yet. This isn’t Miranda. This is Luna; they’re much more civilized about their takedowns here. Besides, they won’t go for you. They’ll get me, and Mattie if he’s back yet. And I think they’ll take us alive. That Stays woman wants to interrogate us, and you can’t question a corpse.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Longer if they want us alive. And longer than that even, because this is a nice neighborhood,” Ivan said. “The tourists don’t want any unpleasantness, and the System doesn’t want anyone to know anything’s wrong. Luckily, we were planning to stay here another few days. If they realize we’re about to run, they’ll shorten the timetable.”
“Ivan, how long?”
“An hour, maybe two. They’ll wait for Mattie to get back. Relax, darling,” he added for the benefit of the cameras all around, and kissed her on the temple. She allowed the gesture, but unwillingly. When he saw her flashing glance, he looked at her with a sort of wary, half-fearful anticipation, the strange desirous look that he gave only her. That look meant that he was hers, meant that when the System came, he would fight and die with her, meant that there was truth beneath his charm. Seeing that look gave Constance the strength to maintain an untroubled expression as they walked—slowly—down the street.
The System was not as subtle as they thought themselves to be, or else they did not care that Ivan and Constance might know they were being followed. The second possibility gave her a chill; if the System no longer cared about being subtle, it meant that their being followed was not a hunt but a threat. It meant that they had Mattie, had Anji, and had Christoph.
No, Constance assured herself. The System could not have captured Anji and Christoph yet, not without her knowing about it. And no one would capture Mattie: her brother was a consummate survivor.
Ivan did not seem troubled, prattling on as if he noticed nothing, but Constance knew him, and she knew his fear. When she dug her fingers into his arm for comfort, he paused but did not otherwise respond.
At last, the Annwn appeared ahead between two other larger crafts of similar make. There was a checkpoint to get into the docks. Ivan handed the man their identification—Constance’s genuine, his faked—and chatted away with him while Constance watched his face closely. The man paused—or seemed to pause—at Ivan’s passport, but he let them through.
As they walked past the checkpoint and into the docks, Constance turned her head and saw the guard at the checkpoint bending down to speak into an intercom, his eyes watching them.
They got into the Annwn without being stopped. The minute the hatch closed behind them, Constance said, “I don’t think we have two hours, Ivan.”
“We do. They want Mattie, and they think we’re trapped.”
“We are trapped,” Constance said. Ivan already was climbing up the Annwn’s sideways hallway, heading for t
he piloting room. “We can’t just lift off; we’re under an atmospheric dome.”
“I noticed. Have a little faith, Constance. Don’t you think Mattie and I can convince that air lock to open?”
Ivan could convince just about anyone to do anything, Constance was sure. It was the one thing she could fear about him. She started climbing up after him just as he disappeared through the door leading to the piloting room. “It’s not whether you can get it open,” she said. “It’s how fast you can do it.”
“Very fast,” Ivan said, tipping an eyebrow at her when she came after him into the room. The Annwn’s piloting room was very small, comfortable for two people but cramped for three. Ivan already was sitting at the main computer interface. “Annie, are you ready for some fun?”
The computer screen blinked on. Constance could just read it over Ivan’s shoulder:
I AM ALWAYS READY FOR FUN. PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU’D LIKE ME TO DO.
“Not answer rhetorical questions for a start,” said Ivan. “But all right. Annie, do you know how to convince the atmospheric dome’s air lock to open up for us?”
Constance leaned on Ivan’s chair to read. MATTIE HAS ALREADY GIVEN ME INSTRUCTIONS.
Ivan turned around to look up at her. “See?”
“I see,” said Constance, and sat down in the chair beside him. When Mattie arrived, she knew, she would be kicked out of this chair so that he could fly the ship, but for now she claimed it as her own. Once Ivan had opened the air lock, any System soldiers following them would have to flee the area or suffocate, and the ship could take off unharmed. Even now Ivan was keying in the course for Mars so that when Mattie arrived they could leave immediately. Their time frame for escape must have been smaller than Ivan had admitted to her.
Lying was a habit with him. She didn’t call him on it this time.
“They’re going to arrest you when you get back to Mars,” he said as he entered the course into the navigation systems. “Just pretend you were shocked that we left so early. Embroider it if you like. You and I were busy in another room when Mattie came in, and suddenly the ship lifted off. Or I was deliberately keeping you busy so that you didn’t know what Mattie was up to. Whatever you think will keep their attention.”
Constance had neither Ivan’s inclination to embroider and storytell nor his talent with lying. “I’ll tell them something.”
“Now we wait for Mattie.”
“He’ll be here.” There were few things Constance had as much faith in as Mattie’s ability to be there when needed. At the moment she had different concerns, namely, what their rapid flight from the moon might change. They’d intended no farewells to Julian; he was on his way, anyway. The bombs had been delivered and in such a way that there was no connection between them and the ships that had collected the bombs. Mattie had gotten out safely and would be on board soon. There was nothing else Constance had planned to do.
She remembered half a conversation she and Ivan had had a long time before. “Did you have a chance to warn your mother?”
“I wish you wouldn’t mention her, even in here.”
“Where else could anyone mention her?” Ivan did not reply. “Well? I don’t want to accidentally murder the great Milla Ivanov.”
“I warned her another way,” Ivan said shortly.
Fine, let him keep his secrets. “You said she might join me,” Constance said.
Ivan laughed. “If she thinks it’s safe and if she thinks you can do what you think you can do, then yes. She hates the System, Constance. It’s the strongest thing she feels. She hates the System more than she cares about anything else.”
Odd phrasing, but Constance was caught up in imagining it: the wife of Connor Ivanov succeeding at last where her husband once had failed and succeeding at the side of the Mallt-y-Nos.
She looked forward to meeting Milla Ivanov.
Ivan said, “They’re closing in around us.”
The change in topic was drastic enough that it left her momentarily off balance, and she knew Ivan well enough to know that his simple sentence was a cover for something else. She wished that for once he would just say whatever it was he really thought the first time he thought it. Mattie might have the patience to read between the lines of his tangled words, but Constance knew it was a waste of her time. “I noticed.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean the way a System intelligence agent has been asking after you and Mattie and you didn’t tell me until now?” Constance asked, and in response, Ivan flashed her that look again. That half-fearful, half-desirous look, all anticipation. It should not have bothered her: Ivan had always been spurred to life by arguing with her, and Constance had always found her blood burning from a conflict. So it was not unusual for Constance to snap and for Ivan to look at her like that, but something about it this time troubled her, something half remembered pricking at her thoughts.
Ivan said, “Did we hurt your feelings?”
“You should have told me the moment you knew.”
“It might have been nothing.”
“A System intelligence agent isn’t nothing,” Constance said.
“And you and Mattie keep no secrets from me,” said Ivan.
Anger flared up in her, totally disproportionate to the tone of Ivan’s remark. “That has nothing to do with this,” she said. “These are things that I have to know, Ivan, if we’re to succeed—”
“You’re not yourself, you know,” Ivan said. He had timed his words perfectly. They punctured Constance’s anger and left her silent, uncertain of his aim. He always timed his words perfectly.
Unimpeded, Ivan continued, his blue gaze tight and focused on her, as if he could dig into her skull and take her apart piece by piece. “When you’re leading, you can’t be Mattie’s sister or Anji’s friend. You can’t be anything but a leader. You lose something like that, you know.”
“I’m not being any different than I am,” Constance said, and Ivan looked at her again in a strange and wary way, and why did the way he looked at her trouble her so much now? It had never bothered her before—
Before either of them could say anything more, there was a rattling below. Constance reached under the computer panel for the gun that she knew Mattie kept hidden there, and Ivan sprang to his feet to stalk almost silently over to the doorway, leaning against the wall to peer out and down the hall.
He was unarmed, the idiot. If the System came through that door—
The tension suddenly left Ivan’s frame. He stepped out of the shadows. Mattie, then. Constance tucked the gun back into its place. Below, she heard the sound of the Annwn’s door closing. She heard Mattie’s voice say conversationally, “Did either of you know that this ship is surrounded by a small army of System soldiers?” but Constance hardly understood his words because with the weight of the gun still resting on her palm and with the question of Ivan’s expression in her head, she finally understood what had been troubling her about the way Ivan looked at her.
“No,” said Ivan, who was focused completely on Mattie—of course—and did not seem to notice Constance’s sudden stillness. “We’re primed for takeoff because we like to live on the edge. Get up here.” He stalked back over to the computer panel. The moment he moved, Constance let go of the gun and rose to her feet, surrendering the second chair to Mattie as he appeared at the doorway.
“Did it work?” she asked Mattie evenly without letting a breath of what she now knew into her voice. Even so, Ivan cast them both a strange and guarded look. Mattie grinned and gave her a thumbs-up, then threw himself into the seat beside Ivan.
The look that Ivan always gave her, that intimate expression that was hers and hers alone—Constance had seen it on his face before, just a few days earlier. The same expression that she had taken for desire, for something close to love, for something that proved he was hers, just as Mattie was hers, just as Anji and Christoph were hers; that was the expression on his face when the System soldier had held a gun to his
head on Pallas and Ivan had expected it to fire. Ivan looked at her the same way he looked at something that would kill him, and he always had.
He had never been hers, Constance knew. He was Mattie’s, maybe, but he was not now and never had been hers.
Ivan was tapping at the computer in front of him, lights sparking on the panels. “Ready, Annie?” Mattie asked, and the ship rumbled and rose.
AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH
Constance came back to chaos.
“What’s going on?” Marisol yelled. “We heard shouting.”
Behind Constance, echoing over the empty mile separating the shuttles from Isabellon, she still could hear the shouts. The soldiers were all armed, Constance saw. Marisol had been on the verge of leading them back into the town.
“I called Arawn,” Marisol said, her fingers gripping Constance’s arm. “He’s coming down with reinforcements. What happened?”
“They turned on us.” The rumble of the generator going silent, the inn going dark. Milla Ivanov silhouetted against the starry lights outside. Her rage roared up like a fire through the shell of her shock. “They attacked us. They have Milla Ivanov. We’re going to get her back.”
A rumble overhead, a sonic boom; Constance lifted her eyes to a light in the sky as a spaceship hurtled down through the atmosphere too rapidly and flames leaped over its hull. This ship was shaped like a disk; its gravity-producing spin was slowing as it entered Mars’s gravity, heading down toward Constance. Arawn. Marisol’s fingers dug into her arm as if she would pull her out of the way of the falling starship, but Constance stood beneath it without flinching.
It braked as it got closer, thrusters adding more flame to the maelstrom surrounding it as it slowed its descent. It landed half a mile away, close—dangerously close—with a shock wave that blasted sand into the air in a second dust storm. Constance was walking toward it before the heat of its arrival could dissipate.
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