“Everything is changing,” he told them. “Our island, the outer worlds. I’ve even been to some of them.” He was bragging. For Nusdilla. But he couldn’t help it. He’d earned at least some of it, hadn’t he?
“I helped Nashara. And Pepper. And in return, they’ve given me some things, and I wanted to pay you back.” He looked at them. There were times when he’d been alone and sick, and they’d fed him. They’d helped him build his niche. They had treated him like family, and like a common thief, he’d run from them for a chance to make money and never looked back.
But he’d come to realize that he loved the island when it had been threatened with destruction. And more importantly, he loved the people he’d lived with.
He didn’t want to leave.
Nashara understood. Pepper less so. But they’d given him the house, and several more. Kay, they said, didn’t need them anymore. She wasn’t coming back to the island. She’d said so in the letter Pepper had found.
He’d wanted to ask, but then didn’t.
It didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t scared. Not after everything he’d already seen.
So he’d taken the houses and places Kay once owned, and helped people crammed away in hidey-holes and gutters that he’d once known.
And for himself, he’d take a room in this house. He would enjoy the space. The comfortable beds.
Some good food.
“There’s this school opening,” he told Nusdilla. “It’ll help us learn Xenowealth technology. It’ll help us learn anything we want. I was hoping you would go with me.”
And when she nodded and smiled back, Tiago couldn’t help thinking that here on Placa del Fuego, things were going to be all right.
Even when the rain alarms went off.
Chapter Forty-Six
New traffic packed Trumball’s docks. Trade had all but opened up directly with the Xenowealth, and merchants had swooped in to take advantage of the new thawing relationship between the two territories now that Xenowealth ships were heading off into League space to battle the individualists.
Kay shoved her way through the crowds, keeping her hair over her eyes. The League had cameras everywhere, and she was still technically a person of interest to them.
Thinkerer’s old warehouse was close.
That was where she wanted to start. At her own pace.
Thinkerer was dead, but he’d left behind traces. Traces that she could pick up to unravel everything he’d been up to. And find out what other outsiders were at play here.
She needed to learn the outer worlds beyond Placa del Fuego. Because there was something worse than aliens and Doaqs. There were the people who had unleashed them on her.
Tracing those all the way back up. She could do that. But before she did that, there was someone she wanted to help. And to do that, she was going to need a spaceship. Unraveling Thinkerer’s network would probably get her access to one, she imagined.
A large hand grabbed her shoulder. She whirled around, pulling a knife free from her belt. Pepper flicked it away from her. “Thinking of going on a trip upstream, are you?” he asked.
They stood for a second in the middle of a crowd that pulled away from them, expecting trouble.
But then Kay nodded. “I used to want to rule Placa del Fuego. To build a castle around me with walls. But these threats keep coming, don’t they? The big ones. You can hide in the most quiet, stable area, but the worlds, they still swirl around and come crashing in eventually.”
“I learned that lesson a hard way once, too,” Pepper told her. “Why are you sniffing around Thinkerer’s warehouse?”
“I need a spaceship.”
“For what?”
She thought about lying to him. Then thought about the moment she’d hung above the wormhole. When the ship had toppled over and the bulkhead came within an inch of crushing her to death.
“I almost died in the wreckage of the Saguenay,” she told Pepper. “Almost died when Tiago shot me as well. Came to thinking about what my personal code of living was.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m not like them.” She nodded at people passing by them. The crowd moving around like a river streamed around rocks. “I won’t ever be a cuddly teddy bear. I was built, designed for a purpose. I won’t ever see them as anything other than tools, will I? It’s hard to fight that. But I can make modifications. I’ve been thinking about debts – and payments.”
“Is that why you left that note, telling us to give Tiago your houses?” Pepper asked, a sudden, slight smile on his lips.
“I ran up a human debt,” she said. “He saved my life on that ship. Despite all that had been done to him. It was a hard decision for him. He almost changed his mind. I saw it in his eyes. So I tried to pay him for it.”
Pepper nodded. “You figure Thinkerer, and his people, they owe you a debt?”
Kay nodded. “Yep. That’ll be one I intend to settle. But more importantly, I think, with this new way of understanding, I still owe a debt to Piper. I haven’t heard about your ship being found. I intend to go find it.”
Pepper held out a hand. “Some people will tell you that’s a fucked up way of looking at your people. But it isn’t. I’ll help. I owe Piper the same debt. The Xenowealth doesn’t know she’s out there, but we do.”
She looked down at his hand.
She would never be able to control him. He was inscrutable to her. And dangerous.
An equal.
Maybe even a friend.
They shook.
“Nashara told me the route and plan she would use if she were in Piper’s position,” Pepper said. “Now all we need is a ship. I think we can find her.”
Kay turned and walked past him. “Then let’s go get one,” she said, as they both slid back into the crowds.
Epilogue
Xenowealth teams had cleaned up the wolf carcasses in the valley.
League and Xenowealth teams of scientists had spent weeks analyzing the wormholes in the clockwork animals’ throats, finding the super-dense collapsible rings that expanded and contracted them useful technology.
The wolves’ wormholes had been contracted down to pinhole size, and then placed inside antimatter containment facilities in a solar orbit and surrounded by the unstable material.
If anything came out of them, they would be destroyed.
More teams searched for any leftover debris. Men in clean suits tramped around with metal detectors and a keen eye.
But what none of them noticed the first night was the body of a wolf crushed under a piece of the rear lattices of the Saguenay.
On the second night of the clean up, the body stirred. It was still dead, and still limp. But something moved inside it. The wolf’s throat bulged and the mouth began to expand further and further.
Something pushed and wormed itself out of the wolf’s throat until a pair of hands reached out and grabbed the jaws. It flailed until it had pulled itself out and fallen onto the ground.
The figure curled up in a ball by the wolf’s mouth and whimpered. Crying softly in the quiet night.
It was cut off from everything. So little bandwidth.
Sure, it had volunteered. It had wanted to help.
But it still hurt. To have lost something so fundamental as the connection to the Structure. So important. It felt like losing a limb. Or a piece of its brain.
Nothing felt right without that connection to the Structure.
And thinking was so, so slow now.
How stupid it had been before it had joined the Structure. How simple. How low.
And it had agreed to return.
After a long minute, the figure calmed itself down. It cut the head off the wolf, sawing at it with a blade until it parted from the destroyed body. It carefully put the wolf’s head in a backpack, zipped it up, and then wiped tears away.
The figure evaded all the teams out in the valley. It moved unnaturally fast across the open ground, a momentary disturbance in the corner of
the vision.
At the crest of the hills around the valley it paused to look down in the night at the lit up town far below.
Then Bakeem continued forward and walked down the mountain.
Acknowledgements
I could barely have imagined three years ago, after finishing up Sly Mongoose, that I would be finishing this book up thanks to the generosity of the fans of the previous three books. What a strange and awesome journey!
Due to the vagaries of commerce, ordering, and the bookstore distribution system the series had been holding flat in sales. We were losing sales in bookstores and slowly spiraling as each book got ordered less, and thus sold less. However readers were increasingly ordering the books directly, so overall we were holding steady. My editor at Tor Books and I put our heads together and decided that I would strike out in a new direction with our next book, Arctic Rising, to see if I could increase my sales.
But that left readers who loved Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose hanging. Many wrote to ask when Pepper was going to come back. They wanted more. And since Sly Mongoose had been published, the world had changed. There were more opportunities for writers to experiment with. In particular the concept of Kickstarter, a method to crowdfund a project via preorders, caught my attention. I saw Tu Publishing spring into existence via Kickstarter. Mur Lafferty hit it out of the park with a series of novellas. Tim Pratt funded a new Marla Mason novel.
For a year I conspired with Pablo Defendini, laying out the details of what I hoped would be a successful Kickstarter project for The Apocalypse Ocean that would allow people to preorder the book, and thus crowdfund it into existence. Pablo worked on a cover graphic, and estimated what he would need to charge me for interior design.
I wasn't sure if the Kickstarter would be successful. I had no expectations. It was terrifying to put one's self out in the public in such a way that the failure would be totally public. People emailed me, wondering about my sanity. Many were concerned about what I would do if it wasn't successful (my response: the same thing I was doing the month before I launched it).
But we were successful. There were enough Xenowealth readers out there that we overshot the amount needed and reached a stretch goal of getting Pablo Defendini to create a map of the Xenowealth in addition to the cover.
So this is the part where I thank the people who made this possible. My thanks to Pablo Defendini, my partner and co-conspirator in this project. I also have to thank my wife, Emily, as usual for being there as I decided to jump into writing this book. She's always got my back. I also would like to thank Alexandria Ferland for her work with initial copy edits, and to Tim Hyatt for final copy edits. All remaining errors are the author's fault.
But the real special thanks go out to the following supporters who went above and beyond to back this project on Kickstarter and make the book real through their generosity:
ArachneJericho
Selby Evans
Michael Mallette
Subterranean Press
Dan Rogart
Alex J. Avriette
I would also like to thank everyone who preordered the limited edition, signed hardcover. Your support made this real:
Fred Kiesche
Raph Koster
Chris Gerrib
Carl Rigney
Paul Stevens
John Wenger
Travis
Martin Debes
Caroline Kierstead
Atit Patel
Howard Carter
KateMacLeod
Jason Chambers
Scott Lynch
James Weber
Kate Baker
Brent Bowen
Rae Carson
rainking187
Libba Bray
ldunagan
David Chamberlain
Freya Buckell
Philip Harris
Special thanks also go out to Kevin Pratt of Black Tusk Books for coming in later in the whole process. He got us over the edge to get Pablo Defendini to design the interior map.
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