By the time she reached Bix and the small huddle of children, she’d formed the skeleton of a plan. The details weren’t up to her.
Bix’s expression transmitted little hope. She gestured for the two oldest boys to round up the group. Again, Tyron was impressed with the leadership this girl displayed. Had she been born in Origin, how different might her life have been?
“Movin’ camp,” she said, taking the rifle back from Tyron. Defeat and sorrow frosted her words. “You can come too.”
“Wait,” Tyron said. “I have an idea. We can get them back.”
Bix’s eyebrows drew up. “Nobody comin’ back from Poisoncry. That’s the way of it. No use tryin’.”
“You did.”
She scoffed. “Barely.”
“But you remember the internal structure? The layout of the Resource Center?”
Fear and hope warred in the girl’s expression. “Yes. Ain’t no use with no help, though. No offense. But together we’re one mixed-up meater and a passel of smalls. Odds ain’t even.”
“I think you need to introduce me to the Heavy Gravity Boys.”
Sixty-Eight
Vin scratched his scalp, canted his head. “What’s she doing here?”
At his side, his twin brother, Dex, performed the same action. It was what he did—they did—when a difficult problem was dropped on them. In this case, it presented itself in the form of Bixtrenslor.
“Too early for trade,” Dex commented, trying not to sound glad to see her.
Truth be told, he’d liked her from the start. Bix was good enough looking, especially the brilliant rust color of her hair. Sometimes he even wondered what it would feel like to touch it. He had taken to letting his brain drift in that particular direction whenever she came to trade for rations to give the little mouth-breathers she was sheltering out past the Skids. But Bix still acted like she didn’t trust them.
Could he blame her, really? Considering how Vin and Tref had treated her in the past. He wanted to explain it was how Koenii liked it run. But it all got tangled up in a knot of words, never set free by his dumb mouth.
Her eyes were puffy, reddened like there’d been waterworks involved. She didn’t appear injured, but the hunch of her shoulders told him it was a different kind of hurt. A strange pang moved over him. It rang of desperation, in fact, that she elected to seek them out at their location, the remains of the gutted Cassandra, instead of their usual meet-up point near the Skids.
She was only two years younger than he and Vex, but her scrawny build made her look like a kid. She had the petite build of Tech stock. Bix claimed her mother had been Tech but her father had been a fourth gen infantry. Maybe that’s what made her a sticky one to haggle with. Her brain worked funny—not bad, just real clever, hard to follow. The Heavy Gravs always found themselves on the losing end of whatever arrangement they’d make with her.
Dex found he didn’t mind very much, as long as she came back.
“What’re you grinning at, ape?” Bix scowled, tossing her head.
He straightened, folding his arms, realizing his brother was starting to snigger. “Nothin’. Just tryin’ to figure your what-for. It ain’t been two weeks since the last run. Them smalls you collect et up all the grub?”
“Don’t need no food.” Bix imitated his stance. “Came askin’ for a differen’ type of help.”
“Oh. We can help you, girl.” Vin looked her up and down in a way that Dex did not like at all. He sensed his brother was doing it on purpose, to get a rise out of him and put on a show for the rest of the Boys. His brother, although his junior by a few minutes, was the clever one. Things occurred to him that Dex in a million years would never have sussed out. It was what made him their leader, despite their tendency to fight.
Some of the Boys chuckled.
“Leave off,” Dex shouted. “That ain’t how we run now. That ain’t Decca.”
They quieted. It earned him a quizzical look from Bix.
Dex could still recall the rain-soaked night when Tyron set them straight. She’d told them the true lay of things. Koenii had the Heavy Gravity Boys working the wrong side of things, she’d explained. The Volunteers she knew and ran with would never work under the yoke of a criminal. They were peacekeepers, meant to right wrongs and certainly not meant to do the whim of creatures like Koenii. It was hard to hear anyone say those things about the boss, but this was a Volunteer sayin’ them. So it must have been true.
Not all the Heavies had been there—just Dex and Vin. The thing that stuck to him most was the bit about Decca, the code of honor that made a soldier a soldier. He’d never possessed a good memory. Vin’s had always been better. But the learning on Decca resonated with him, like hearing the words to a song you’d never heard before but knew all the same.
To this day Dex felt the most ashamed for having tried to shoot Tyron. In the end, she’d been good about it, deciding to only leave him with broken ribs.
They’d done things just like Tyron had suggested. Turning on Koenii seemed an easy thing in hindsight. Figuring out where to go from there was the hard part. They went rudderless for a long stretch. Vin had the brainbox to fetch up against the people Koenii knew. He came up with the idea to run the smash and grabs. Being in Koenii’s employ for so long, they knew all the hidey-holes and the secret tunnels into and out of their dens. At first, it was easy pickings. Eventually, things had gotten scarce, especially since Poisoncry had stopped all trade coming into Brojos. It was those Guild skews’ way of putting the squeeze to them.
Dex wanted them to fight back. It was something his brother had railed against, but the other Heavy Gravs cottoned to it when they saw what they could get in trade for the Poisoncry tech they stole. They’d even taken down one of Poisoncry’s atmo-hoppers not long back. The crew had managed to elude them, however, leaving a bloody trail that disappeared. They’d lost two of the Boys in the time since and Dex carried the guilt with him.
“They’re agreeable,” Bix shouted over her shoulder.
Part of the shadows behind the girl coalesced into the shape of a taller person. A woman, from the curves; an injured one, from the slight limp to her stride.
“Glory all,” Vin muttered. “Tyron.”
Dex let his jaw hang.
An angry scar spread out from her left temple to disappear under a scalp of severely short hair. She seemed to have lost mass, looking at the shadows of her face. The amber eyes took in everything, just as he remembered. If someone told him she could read your mind or chew metal, he would have bought it. She was dressed in black utilities worn through at the knees, but it did nothing to take away from the edge to her.
This was what it was like to stand in front of a god of war.
Dex exchanged a look with his brother. He was aware of the low murmur of excitement, the anxious shifting of the Heavy Gravs behind him. He found he’d fallen into attention.
She paused a few feet away, folding her arms. Tyron looked from Bix to Vin and Dex, making her inspection obvious. Dex drew his shoulders back, thrust his chin forward. Tyron noticed this, arched an eyebrow. Nothing like recognition in her gaze. It made him feel slighted, somehow. She moved past him, stopping in the center of their group. Even Heavies that had been lounging on the crates now stood.
No one spoke.
Tyron faced Bix and gave a grim shrug.
“They’ll do. I guess.”
Sixty-Nine
Hadelia—Obscrum in particular—was the eternal place of autumn that Jon remembered, but without the vibrancy the season held on Argos. There, autumn promised renewal after the coming winter rains; here it was in a perpetual state of dying but forever deprived of that final rest. The few plants that grew out in the open here lacked the energy for the showiness of autumn colors. He doubted any of the inhabitants would have noticed, even if there were things of beauty under the grimy, grease-streaked sky. The perfect place for ghosts to nest. It contained the memory of happiness as well. Enough to torture him.
> It brought to mind the languid nights huddled with Sela in the communal warmth of their bunk on the battered old Cassandra, the orange glow of the pilfered heating element as it dispelled the chill. The dreams he unfolded for her during those nights had been made ridiculous now by time and reality.
You’re here. Did you think finding me would be so easy?
Jon turned from the view over Obscrum’s arguably nicer district framed by shattered glass panels. He swallowed against the tightness forming in his throat and reached for the tumbler of scorch rum. It came from a fancy bottle found remarkably still intact in one of the already pillaged rooms they’d set up as their new forward operating base. The former occupants, a high-level Poisoncry enforcer and her entourage, had the intelligence to flee rather than face the Ironvale landing forces. Smart move. He said a silent toast to the mystery owner and downed it, grimacing at the taste. He’d never liked hard spirits, but it was a distraction from the overwhelming sense of defeat.
Sela’s ghost frowned at him where it lounged against the overstuffed furniture, propping her boots on the edge of a once-expensive table. The dirty orange sunset glazed the neat-as-a-pin utilities he first remembered seeing her wearing what seemed like a million years ago.
All this way? To drink and scowl out the window?
Jon tipped the glass in salute to her. “Searching an entire planet takes time, Ty.”
Again he told himself that she was not really there. He also knew that his Sela would be mortified to return as some pale apparition, powerless to wrest anything more than guilt or sorrow from the living. She was a creature of absolutes, never half-measures.
Come and find me, her ghost challenged, unfolding from the chair. Her hair was a gleaming halo of shortened blonde spikes. It cast her face in shadow. He knew what he’d see there if he looked more closely: a subtle hook to her mouth, skin around the eyes tightened as her gaze went from the glass to his face in quiet admonishment. For someone whose actions were violent and grand, her face would have often seemed an expressionless mask to a stranger. It took living and working with her over half a decade for him to understand its subtle changes.
If you truly believed me gone, you would not have come.
At the docks before his departure, Erelah had tried to warn him against returning to Hadelia. Even in the clinging semi-daze of her own grief, she saw it in him. Her embrace had been tight, fierce as if she sought to fix him in place. He’d been so close in that moment to confessing everything to her: seeing Sela, talking to her. But would she have understood? The girl that once housed the memories and thoughts of others in her mind. How could she not?
“Hadelia’s a big place,” he said to Sela’s ghost.
Obscrum had undergone major upheaval in their absence. Chaos reigned. Anything that might have passed for a Poisoncry-held government complex had been ransacked or torched. There was no one simple means to begin his search. His contract with Ironvale held him to Obscrum for now, no matter how he itched to journey to Brojos and seek out the gutted remains of their Cassandra. Simply abandoning his post would only serve to make him a fugitive of Ironvale, an unnecessary complication.
Sela shook her head slightly. You’ve been hunted before; since when did that stop you?
Good question.
“Sir?”
Jon regarded the guildsman that had appeared in the middle of the room. He got the impression that perhaps the young man had been trying to get his attention for some time. How much had he seen?
Rovent. Rhymes with rodent, he recalled thinking. A plastic, arbitrary greeting done at the landing site as the young man was assigned as Jon’s aide, something apparently expected of someone of Jon’s station (confusingly generic title of Special Information Officer notwithstanding), but nothing he would have requested. Jon sensed Yasu’s influence, somehow. He knew what Rovent really was—a minder, someone to keep tabs on him and to report back to Utaemon. There was a time when Jon might have found this an annoyance, but a dark corner of his mind found it amusing that they’d even go to this much trouble.
“Ensign.” Jon downed the last of the rum in the tumbler, making no move to hide the fact that he’d been drinking. Rovent watched him with an avidness that confirmed his suspicions. Jon held the bottle out to his unwanted guest, the gesture coming from a surly, antagonistic place in his skull.
Rovent looked at the bottle, a little mouse sniffing out a trap. Then he gave a bow of his head, their version of apology. “I am on duty, sir.”
Jon gave a half-shrug, placing the now much lighter bottle on the windowsill. “It’s sunset somewhere.”
It was an expression they’d used on the Storm King in the officer’s lounge on those mind-numbingly long jaunts between flexers, the concept of a terrestrial sunset as abstract as their next duty assignment.
The kid stared at him blankly.
“Want something?” Jon prompted
The ensign turned from his survey of the room. Jon felt no urge to explain or apologize for its state. The heavy overcoat with its green and gold armband bearing the hastily applied Veradin crest (the seamstress inadvertently gave one of the Fates a third arm) lay strewn over the back of the overstuffed furniture. His light duty kit had disgorged its rumpled contents atop the once-expensive surface of the dining table. Empty e-ration wrappers gathered around their feet like shed leaves. Ty would have been all over him about the state of the room.
The thought made him itch to reclaim the bottle from the windowsill.
“Sir,” Rovent said. “The sweep teams returned today with a Poisoncry prisoner.”
“And?” Jon asked. Deciding that this was going to take a while, he elected to collapse to the chair, further rumpling the hatefully staunch Guild-issue uniform tunic. He was not guildsworn, not technically. He’d taken no pledge. However, he was no ordinary civilian. They didn’t know what to do with him, in truth. Yasu had pulled the necessary strings. In hindsight, the strange little man had been perhaps too eager to grant Jon’s wish as if he was happy to be done with him.
The kid faltered. “Officer Veradin, it is a rare thing. Poisoncry will self-terminate rather than suffer capture. The prisoner was apprehended before he got that opportunity.”
“In that case, Captain Utaemon must be giddy.” He propped his feet on the edge of the table, an imitation of Sela’s ghost.
“Sir, the prisoner wishes to treat with us. He’s offered an exchange of information.”
“Is that unusual?” The heaviness of the scorch rum had wormed its way into his brain by degrees, giving everything that long-sought-after sense of detachment, making everything manageable. The kid was trying his best to sour it.
“He will do so only with you.”
“What?”
“He has asked for you specifically,” Rovent said it with an incredulity that Jon could not fault. “By name.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “The captain sends me to retrieve you for this purpose. Now.”
The captain is probably annoyed as Skeelah that I would even be involved.
Jon stood a little unsteadily. The light of the suns outside was now the purple smear of an old bruise. The meager warmth of the room had disappeared. The thought of spending another night in this cold, empty space appealed to him less than engaging with a mysterious prisoner of war. After all, he wasn’t exactly burdened with glorious purpose.
Admittedly, his curiosity had been piqued, and the situation did have the added benefit of antagonizing the staunch Utaemon. “What’s this prisoner called?”
“Fisk.”
Seventy
The warmth of the scorch rum evaporated under the frigid night. Jon felt sobriety returning like a familiar pain. In the brief exposure from the ground car to the makeshift holding facility—some partially shelled-out building that once housed one of Obscrum’s innumerable gambling houses—flecks of ice assaulted Jon’s face.
He was aware of the acid roil in his gut that spoke of too much drink and too litt
le food. Rovent, Fates bless him, pressed a heavy warm mug of insta-cal into his hand. The urge to take back every ugly thought he’d held for the young man struck him.
They waited for Utaemon under the balefully brilliant temporary lights strung throughout what was once a Torquiv salon. The brightness made everything look cheap and overexposed. However, there were no more drunken patrons here to care. All the public spaces here suffered similarly under the Ironvale occupation. The corrupt men and women who ran the gambling houses, brothels and drug dens had disappeared with the fleeing masses, leaving disgruntled employees and so-called “unions” unpaid. The power grid and sanitation services, such as they were, were the first to break down. As a consequence, there had been no power to large areas of the city and unreliable water for weeks.
War was ugly and often compounded the issues of bureaucracy. Jon scoffed to himself. It sounded like something Uncle would have said. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Two heavily armored guards were posted to either side of a vault room entrance, impassive as the defaced ornamental statues that populated the abandoned parlor. Captain Utaemon appeared between them. Making little effort to conceal his consternation, he looked Jon up and down. He did this every time as if reconfirming some internal list of flaws.
Jon knew the man disliked him. It was a sentiment he would have been compelled to return if he really cared. He suspected the captain’s dislike was a professional one, not personal. He had been forced to take him on. Until now, Utaemon had been happy enough to ignore him. But something had altered that plan, forcing them to deal with each other. Jon held some sympathy—it was a position neither one of them had asked to be in.
“Do you know this man, Officer Veradin?” Utaemon asked. He was not one to linger on preambles. “This Fisk?”
“No. Should I?” Jon handed the empty mug back to Rovent, who immediately slinked away for parts unknown.
Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3 Page 26