–7. Metus

metus ~ūs, m.

1. fear, dread

When he is nineteen, the things Rain kills are no longer made of burlap.

There is no audience. There are surprised gurgles, sometimes a gasp, but most often there are just stunned silences. He’d aim for the groin—the femoral artery there emptying the body quicker than any other—but then they’d make noise, and so the throat would always be his territory. The skin of throats and the veins beneath were more familiar to him than the taste of bread, the feel of cotton sheets—more home than home was.

He slits a merchant’s throat—the wife drugged asleep in the bed next to his red corpse—and then starts for home. Spider’s Web rule four: congregating in public is always a liability. So when Rain sees Green-One standing beneath a streetlight in the disinfectant-washed late-night streets of Mid Ward, he approaches warily. Surveillance drones hum everywhere, hovering in blinking purple lights high above the tram rail and zipping between the holographic crucifixes of church steeples. It’s only a matter of time before one of them makes a routine pedestrian sweep and catches them on camera.

Rain stops just before the streetlight, never once looking at the cloaked figure that leans against the pole.

“The cape makes you look more suspicious,” he drawls. Green-One doesn’t miss a beat.

“Violet-Two is dead.”

Rain’s blood freezes. Not her. She was the last of them, the kindest of them. She was his family—they had spoken of leaving the Web and starting a family on some long, tender nights. He had braced himself for the possibility, as any Spider does, but… “How?”

“Ambush.” Green-One spits. “The archons used her to flush out an informant ring. Sacrificed her.”

“Informant ring for who?”

“Does it matter?” Green-One snaps lava at him. “She’s dead.”

Rain clenches his fists, leather gloves squeaking. They are the only ones left, then, of their childhood circle. Their family. The others are gone, and only they remain.

Green-One exhales suddenly. “There’s a noble—high rank. They’re plotting something.”

“Something?” Rain presses.

“Uprising.”

“Against the king?”

“Against everything.”

“What do you mean, ‘everything’?” Rain waits, but when there’s no answer he steps into Green-One. “I won’t let Violet-Two’s death be for nothing, Green. What do you need me to do?”

Green-One finally looks at him, hard amber in his eyes. The streetlamp above fizzles weakly and then dies. Shadows consume them, hiding them from the prying purple eyes of the drones. “Stop taking the daily pills.”

“Brother, the withdrawal, and the webmakers will—”

“It’s how they track us—nanomachines in the digestive tract. They lace them with low levels of dust to keep us taking them.”

Rain suspected the tracking, with the way every contact knew he was coming before he stepped foot through their door, but dust? They’d been taking dust since they were children? He doesn’t want to believe it, but the withdrawals that spare no one, the way none of them seemed capable of refusing the pills for long… Green-One doesn’t relent.

“Every few decades, a noble reads old Earth philosophers and decides to play games of virtue. Of change. The Spider’s Hand is the king’s first line of defense. The king’s allies throw us at the problem, hoping we will fix it quietly. The archons replace us with children. The Web spins faster. More die. More are replaced. The longer resistance continues, the more the Web suffers. You have to infiltrate Polaris—the rebellion. Find the noble heading it and kill them.”

“But…isn’t that what the archons are trying to do? If we follow their orders—”

“They’re being outsmarted,” Green-One says. “Deliberately misled by this noble. Wherever they send us, it won’t do any good. We have to operate on our own—cut to the heart.”

“I can’t leave the Web.”

“You can. You’re the only one who can.”

Rain shakes his head. “I’m not—”

“No more modesty, brother. You’re the best.”

Another streetlight fizzles, and a blinking wave of brownout plunges across Mid Ward. Tall, cylindrical buildings flicker—a pattern of light and shadow, communicating something and yet nothing.

Rain finds his voice slowly. “What if this noble truly succeeds at changing things? Would the suffering not be for something then?”

Green-One scoffs. “You and Violet-Two—idealists to the last.”

“Green—”

“They will use guns. They will use swords. They will hack. They will construct makeshift battleships on their substations and use those. But in the end, the king will always win. He has always won.”

Rain follows Green-One’s glare to the flickering holoscreen of the Supernova Cup, the massive humanoid steeds racing across it, and their enormous lances suddenly seem to gleam more pointedly. Rain understands it all at once in the way a child understands reading for the first time, a new world opening before him: the king has the guards and the assassin guilds, but he has disguised his true power as entertainment. A steed could outmaneuver any warship, any artillery. The steeds are faster and stronger and ridden by nobles loyal to him.

The king will always win.

Green-One suddenly opens his vis to a picture of a young spider eating at the cafeteria table, smiling with brothers and sisters just as young as him. “The webmakers gave him the name Violet-Two.”

Rain’s stomach curls in on itself—their names recycled. Their places taken. His family hollowed out and used as shells for strangers. Through his spiraling mind, he hears the shiver in the air and whirls on instinct, projection knife thrown like a vermillion comet. It catches the wing of a surveillance drone hovering in the nearby bushes, and the drone keels violently to the ground not twenty paces away before bursting into flame.

The assassins share a wordless moment before the sirens begin, before they have to part once more.

“We are spiders, brother,” Green-One says. “We make the Web. And we must protect it.”

Rain isn’t the best, but he is good—good enough to hide the pills in his tonsils and fish them back up again, to grit through the blistering headaches and sweat through his armor quietly. He thinks of Violet-Two and all the others of his family, dead and gone, and finds the strength to continue on. He thinks about the girl who feels like his last family—Synali, riding in the Supernova Cup. He worries: Is she all right? Will she survive? Is she caught up in these noble games as he is?

He completes his contracts over the next few weeks with hours to spare, hours he spends in the darkest recesses of the Low Ward docks. Bursting with loudspeakers and the creak of rust and the zipper-tear hum of cargo ship plasma vents, he can barely hear himself think. Thankfully, he doesn’t need to hear to find Polaris, he just has to see—following the plastic fibers of bright red strung around beams and corrugated rooftops. They made the clues easy but the path difficult; the red strings lead not to a singular building but a series of emergency maintenance tunnels—Under-ring where there shouldn’t be Under-ring. The Under-ring always smells the same—outdated gasoline—and it always looks the same, labyrinthine in its old Earth design, with roundabouts for ancient wheeled vehicles and pits that drop to nowhere. Like a rat in a maze, he runs, mapping it out as he goes, his dust withdrawals grinding his brain between his ears all the while.

Polaris is well hidden but still human, and he follows the faintest gatherings of hairs too long to be animal, bare outlines of dusty footprints leading him down the right tunnels. As he staggers, sweating, around yet another lightless concrete turn, he realizes his dust withdrawal serves a twofold purpose—to stop the Web from tracking him and to disguise his blade-worked body as an untrained, raw, exhausted commoner’s so the rebellion won’t doubt his origin. Rain’s awe grows; Green-One has thought this through down to the last detail.

At last Rain reaches it—a tunnel dark and unremarkable, until the laser sights blossom on his chest from behind barricades. Polaris. Dozens of them. He vis-projects the bait Green-One gave him, letters scrawling long and blue against the terse, scarred faces behind each scope:

SECURITY PERMIT LEVEL ALPHA: CARGO VESSEL H.R.M.S. ENDURANCE