The air that went to his lungs was as dry as air could be, and it tore at his throat with every breath.
Why you? he thought about asking the presence just behind him, cold and dark and certain, like Jupiter looming, like the inward creep of the ice. Out of everything, everyone, why her? He had killed her, certainly, but he hadn’t felt bad about it. She had died on his lap, and she had been small and heavy and warm, but she was cold now.
Through the supports of two blackened houses ahead he could see a soldier. He was young, with black hair in tight curls to his scalp, and Ivan looked at his back and knew that if he walked out into the alleyway between houses, the young man would see him and would kill him.
For a paralyzed moment he stood, torn between conflicting impulses and ready to step out into the open, with the breath of the ice on his back.
Then he saw the girl.
She was one of the wary refugees, darting through the outskirts of the destroyed town like a shadow. She was rail-thin, with ash-blonde hair loose and tangled, in boots that looked warm but worn. She held an assault rifle in her arms like she didn’t know how to balance without it. There was something pinched about her face, her long thin nose, her ash-smudged cheeks. She was gray, like a ghost, and she was heading straight for the alleyway with the soldier, but she was coming from the other way and so she could not see the danger.
There was no way past the soldier without being seen, and Ivan was certain that the soldier would see her and shoot before she would notice him. He tried to catch her eye and shake his head—to shout would be to catch the soldier’s attention; he had to stay in the cold and the silence—but she could not see him.
When she was just at the lip of the alley, about to round the corner, he said, “Don’t!” and that was it: the soldier whipped around and fired in his direction. Ivan dropped to the ground, where the ice could stick to the damp fabric of his clothes like hands closing around his limbs.
He heard an answering retort of gunfire and a woman crying out. Shouts resounded from somewhere distant, more voices he did not recognize. For a moment he was sure that the woman was dead, and then small fingers were tugging at his arm, and he looked up into the gray eyes of the girl with the ashy hair.
“Come on!” she said, and her accent was familiar—cultured, Lunar—and then she was pulling up, and he followed her to his feet.
Beyond her, in the alleyway, the soldier was lying dead, blood creeping out from beneath him to freeze on the ice.
“Come on!” said the girl again, and the shouts of people called by the gunfire were louder now, and so Ivan followed her away from Mara, out into the crests and cliffs of Europa’s open ice.
BACKWARD
Killing the Martian representatives was one of the most satisfying cons Ivan ever pulled off.
Every piece fit in perfectly; every moment was balanced on itself like the self-sufficient notes of a perfectly written aria, soprano voice soaring above the thunderous pseudopercussion of trumpets.
Ivan got them into the building with his charming smile and his Terran lilt, and it was a strange and vicious satisfaction to see how easily the guards bent beneath the lyricism of Earth’s accent. The adrenaline had begun the moment he and Mattie had stepped inside.
There were cameras everywhere here. Ivan knew better than to show his satisfaction, and Mattie knew better than to congratulate him in any way, but Ivan could feel Mattie’s delight radiating against his side nonetheless.
Mattie had studied the layout of the building, and he steered Ivan with the slightest of touches to his arm and hand like a rider guiding a familiar horse. He did not speak. Mattie was hopeless at shedding his Mirandan twang, and none of them wanted to risk such a low-class accent being heard inside such hallowed System halls.
They met another guard in front of the door to the observation area. The Martian representatives invited the public to come watch them, of course, much as the representatives themselves watched the public through their cameras. Their meeting would be broadcast publicly as well for those who could not attend in person to watch and marvel at the System in action.
But, Ivan knew, only the notable and the Terran would actually be allowed into the building.
He smiled at the guard. She was young, with light blonde hair that was strangely dull beneath the fluorescent lights. The slightest sign of something off and she would shoot them both dead here on the System’s polished floors. If she did, Mattie would push the detonator before he died and they would both go up in a furious explosion, one that Constance could watch from her station outside the city. She would mourn them fiercely, Ivan knew, but not without the slightest trace of satisfaction for the glory of their deaths.
Constance and Mattie would have gone through with this plan even without Ivan, and if they had, they would without any doubt be the ones going up in a terrible explosion and Ivan the one watching alone from miles away. But with Ivan here, neither Mattie nor Constance would die, or if they did, he would not have to be the one left waiting alone.
The percussion in his chest picked up a faster beat.
“Is this the observation deck?” he asked the guard, friendly, guileless. He was as committed to the role as he had to be, of course, in order to pull himself and Mattie out from those jaws alive.
“Just inside, sir,” she told him. She was Martian. Something about that twanged oddly in the symphony in Ivan’s mind, but he pushed it aside. There could be no distractions now, not while he had to be his character.
He and Mattie were inside in a moment. There were not very many people there. The observation deck was a covered balcony above the Martian representatives’ chamber, with solid glass separating the watchers from the System representatives below. Solid enough glass to resist a bullet or two but not strong enough to resist a bomb.
They lingered for a time. Ivan counted out the measures in his head. Long enough to seem reasonable, not so long that they were memorable.
Out of sight of the other watchers, Mattie slipped the bomb into place, wedged between two chairs. He used the cant of Ivan’s body to hide the gesture from the cameras overhead. It was so smooth that Ivan almost didn’t notice it himself.
The symphony in Ivan’s head changed key and picked up the pace, switching from cantabile to cabaletta. He exchanged a wordless glance with Mattie. To the cameras, it would read as boredom; in the glance actual, Mattie confirmed that he had planted the bomb.
Their departure from the building was as smooth as their entrance, and as unremarked. When Ivan stepped out into the street again, he inhaled a deep and dusty breath of the cool, thin Martian air.
They had hit every beat with perfect timing, in perfect order.
Constance was waiting for them outside the city, outside the range of the System’s ever-present cameras. When she saw them, she unfurled her concealing scarf from her head and exposed a face like the rising sun.
Mattie placed the detonator in her hand. Constance studied it for a moment, her fingers stroking lightly on its sides. Then she lifted her head, and her eyes flashed like gunmetal, and she set the bomb off.
In the city, far distant now, smoke rose. Ivan’s heart was still pounding. All three of them were alive. All three of them were unharmed. All three of them were safe. He’d kept the whole thing under control, and not once had it come out from under his thumb.
“Didn’t think the bomb was that strong,” Mattie remarked, with a laconic edge that spoke to his own satisfaction, and at his other side Constance was smiling like a wolf set upon a kill. Mattie had been right, Ivan thought. This was how the three of them should be.
FORWARD
Mara was shaped, like Mattie’s old hometown on Miranda, in a roughly symmetric fashion that reflected the shape of the greenhouse enclosure above. On Europa, the greenhouse enclosures were hexagons; there would be six main roads in Mara, each of which stretched out toward one of the six greenhouse walls. All of them, of course, would lead to the center of town and the System’s g
overnment buildings.
In due time Mattie’s steps took him to where the System stronghold had been.
The crowd of refugees began to thin long before he reached the center; the flow of people in flight began to reverse, people running away from whatever was ahead. Mattie found himself battling shouting, frightened people just to move on. Whatever those people were running from, Mattie figured that what he was escaping was worse.
You’re a runner, Ivan’s voice came to mind in the cacophony of his escape. Mattie shrugged it off. It had no meaning; Ivan had been being an ass, and in any case, what the hell else could Mattie do now except run?
Long before the buildings changed from Europan native houses on their stilts to the Terran architecture of the System, squat square stone buildings rooted in the ice, Mattie heard the gunfire. The crowd around him cleared. The road beneath him was no longer ice but stone embedded into the ice; bits of it were broken from old explosions and sat askew. The System buildings around him had been bombed; Mattie could recognize the type if he tried: a few Eridian Class 50s, common and easy to acquire, and at least one Cerean Class 20 to take that kind of a bite out of the building beside him. It had once been a System post office, he thought; he recognized the drab stone. Now it was only half of itself, the hollowness of the rooms inside exposed by the destruction of its outer wall. A System ground vehicle had been abandoned beneath the jagged teeth of the blasted brick wall, black smoke pouring from its hood. When Mattie walked past it, he saw a shape slumped over the wheel, flesh colored pulpy red and crisped black. System, he hoped.
The road beside the bombed building was intact, but the ice beneath the road had been melted by the fires whose heat Mattie could still feel. The road became a bridge, fragile, over a pool of frigid melt. The stone creaked beneath his feet but held.
His steps had brought him to the center of town, a hexagonal open space with a single building in the center that was encircled by stone steps, like a squat pyramid. That building would once have been where the System governor had lived. With his gun out, he skirted the open space, keeping low and as near to the rubble of the buildings on the outside as he could. The battle had moved on, but Mattie could still hear gunfire. He wished Ivan had taken the gun.
When he crept out of the center of town between two ruined buildings and back onto the road to Aquilon, he nearly walked into a firefight.
Instinct had him down and behind a fallen Europan house before he’d really registered the sound. Machine gun fire rattled out again furiously fast, and Mattie clutched his gun to his chest and swore under his breath. He tried to get his bearings. The gunfire had come from ahead of him. If he tried to take the road, he would be shot.
Craning his neck over the edge of the fallen support beam, he spotted a woman and a man crouched together behind the rubble of the System building, conferring in low voices. The woman—cherubic, with hair tucked up into a cap—was talking fast and low to her companion, a soft-eyed man with the same rounded cheeks and elfish chin as she. When Mattie craned his neck to see, the man’s eyes darted over his sister’s shoulder and fixed on Mattie’s face.
Another blast of gunfire forced Mattie to duck back down again. Splinters flew off over his head. Their attackers were aiming for him.
But was the other side System or misguided rebels? He couldn’t see them, not without coming out of his cover. He looked again at the pair crouched nearby. The woman, at least, was wearing a uniform of some sort, but it was ragged and patched. System wore uniform, he knew, but the System wouldn’t be so ill dressed.
Another blast of gunfire struck his hiding place, then swept over to send shards of plaster and stone flying out from where the other group had taken cover. The next spree from the machine gun tore chunks off of Mattie’s cover, and fuck these people, Mattie decided, and stood up and fired two shots at the source of the attack.
“Shit!” said the woman’s voice, and then she was up as well, firing at their attacker. Mattie hoped she had more ammunition than he did. Now Mattie could see that whoever was operating the machine gun was doing it from a mobile turret; he recognized the shape from Miranda. The enormous gun had been rooted to the ground on a stand, the better for the user’s aim, the worse for their mobility. Someone was crouched in the poor cover provided by the stand; they’d ducked at Mattie’s attack, but now they swung the gun, firing wildly and missing. Bullets chipped at what was left of the System building at Mattie’s back. He heard gunshots strike behind him, but none of them hit him. He had only one bullet left, but he pressed forward, toward that turret, and for the first time since he had left Constance behind on Mars he felt like he was actually doing something, as if finally—finally!—all that black anger and force that had been building up inside of him was being let loose, and he was at long last as he was meant to be and not some bitter and twisted thing. Things were clear for a moment: no more questions about Ivan, no more anger about Constance, just the purity and clarity of this one moment.
He reached the turret before the man using it could aim and shot him there with his last bullet. His attacker was wearing a uniform, ragged and patched but different from the strange woman’s. Mattie stood over the body and the abandoned gun and found that he was breathing hard. Strangely, his gaze went to the useless gun in his hand, and strangely, he thought of his sister’s fierce grim joy as Earth burned.
Steps behind him had him turning sharply, Constance forgotten, his useless gun coming up automatically in his hand.
The muzzle of it ended up pointed directly at the young man with the large brown eyes. Mattie lifted his hands in surrender, though at his movement the woman raised her weapon in turn and advanced forward, her mouth set grim beneath the shadow of her cap.
From somewhere nearby, someone shouted a warning, and then an explosion sounded and left Mattie’s ears ringing. He moved his finger from the trigger and tilted the muzzle of the gun away from the stranger.
The woman wasted not a second. She dropped her gun and started off toward the road, snagging her brother’s arm as she passed. He tugged her to a stop, looking back at Mattie.
“So come on,” she said to Mattie a few steps from the pull of the road. Her accent was reassuringly outer planetary—Europan native, if his ear was good. “It’s too dangerous to stay here.”
Mattie’s gun was out of bullets anyway. With one last glance down at the System turret and the dead man it sheltered, he followed the strangers out onto the road to Aquilon.
BACKWARD
Constance Harper had an eye out the window at the red front of the oncoming Martian storm, with hot water running out of the faucet and throwing up a thin steam over her chapping hands. Ivan watched her until Mattie finished drying his plate and thrust it into Ivan’s hands.
“Higher cabinet,” he instructed, and Ivan turned his gaze away from the bent of Constance’s brows against the dimming blaze of the sun and pushed the plate up to the highest shelf.
He considered carefully how their conversation might look from the perspective of a System agent watching through the camera set into the ceiling overhead and aimed at the back of Constance Harper’s neck and judged it safe to ask, “How long until the storm hits?”
“Five minutes,” Constance said, and the sunlight reddened as the edge of the dust swept up between them and it.
Mattie ran a towel disinterestedly over another plate and handed it to Ivan. It was still damp underneath. Ivan put it away.
From the distance of the main bar area, a door slammed. “Halloo!” Anji sang out, her light steps accompanied by a heavier tread. Christoph, too.
“Two minutes,” Constance revised with an imprudent quirk to her lip. Mattie bent over his plate and smirked.
There was defying the System, and then there was flat foolishness. Ivan took Mattie’s next plate and said nothing.
The front of the storm had nearly reached them. The sun was visible only as a brighter spot of red. Clumps of dirt beat like fists against the glass of Constance’s
kitchen window. Dust followed the wind in an upward sweep when it reached the wall of the bar.
“Ah,” said Constance, soft exhalation, and twisted off the faucet. Ivan looked to see that the water had come out red. It was dripping from her hands and stained the towel that Mattie willingly surrendered to her.
“Dust in the pipes,” Mattie explained.
“It happens every now and then.” Constance dropped the towel. Ivan didn’t offer to get it for her. She bent down to pick up the towel and while she was there reached underneath the sink and flipped the switch.
All over the house, the lights—and the surveillance—went black.
Constance straightened up and dropped the towel on the counter.
“It’s done?” Ivan asked, and Mattie grinned.
“Yep,” he said, looking satisfied with himself, as well he might; designing a switch that would make the System think the failure of their surveillance had been a consequence of the storm and not of interference was a work of brilliance. But even though Ivan trusted Mattie and believed in his brilliance, he still eyed the surveillance cameras with unease. A clever trick, but one they used perhaps too often.
But when Mattie followed Constance out of the kitchen, Ivan followed Mattie.
In the bar proper, Anji and Christoph helped Constance set up the candles. Their little light could not fill the room. Constance moved, chiaroscuro, in and out of flickering shadow with her hand shielding a little flame over her heart as she lit the candles.
Anji glanced up, shadows hanging from her neck and arms, jewels glinting like leopard eyes in her ears. She grinned. “Leontios!”
Ivan said, “What pirate vagrant taught you to imitate human speech?”
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