–2. Invenio

inveniō ~enīre ~ēnī ~entum, tr.

1. to come upon, meet

The ocean at the bottom of the noble spire is beautiful indeed.

From his place unloading crates of fresh fish, Rain watches the artificial waves rise and curl in on themselves, the horizon a simulated blur of azure. White foam bubbles over the pale sand of the shore and recedes once more into the sea in a continuous loop. Rise and fall, rise and fall. Like breathing.

“Hey!” his boss barks. “I didn’t hire you to stand around and gawk, pretty boy! Get the crates to the door now.”

Rain keeps his head down as he shuffles to the side door of the seaside manse’s patio and back again. There is a momentary pleasure in the sweat and the sun and the salt smell of the sea, and Rain revels in the motions of honest work. No blood or torture or hiding. His dust withdrawal headache is splitting his skull in two, but if he looks at the ocean for long enough, he can ignore the roiling in his stomach and the cold sweats all over his body. His arms go abruptly weak, and he drops a crate, and the boss takes it upon himself to backhand him, hissing about how much it cost. The other loaders don’t even blink, save for one—a burly man with more hair than skin.

“Give ’im a break, Mr. Baker—guy’s been moving twice what we are.”

“Working faster’s no good if you break it all,” the boss snaps. “You watch him if you want, Gern, but the next one’s coming out of your pay.”

The man called Gern offers a hand to Rain, and he takes it wordlessly. The two move boxes in silence, and then, “Dust, huh?”

Rain looks to Gern as he sets his crate down on the doorstep. “Sorry?”

“Dust,” Gern mutters, wiping his face on his tunic. “My brother just got off it. Rough stuff. You’re a bit buffer than he is, though—don’t look half-bad.”

Rain isn’t sure what to say. The recluses sent by the Web to kill him are always on his mind, and so he keeps his words to himself. Gern fills the quiet by offering him a small white pill from his pocket.

“Here, take it. Helps with the headaches. I’ve got a ton left over.”

The Web’s inborn urge in him is to mistrust, but Green-One’s influence speaks louder; a man like this has no reason to drug him. It goes down with a medicinal tang. Slowly, minute by minute and crate by crate, Rain’s headache dissipates. At last the hovercart is empty, and the boss and the others go to lunch while he and Gern volunteer to take inventory one last time.

“All right.” Gern gets to his feet. “Should be good. Lock it up and let’s go.”

Rain doesn’t move. His head is better, but his heart is worse. A stray kindness should mean nothing—it’s always meant nothing, coming from prey. But Gern is not prey. He should be, but Rain’s dust-starved mind refuses the idea of it as it never has before—this man is not prey because Rain is not a Spider anymore. He betrayed his Web by letting Synali live. He betrayed Green-One by letting Yavn go. And he betrays them all now by choking Gern out instead of killing him.

When Rain whispers “I’m sorry” in the man’s ear, it is not wholly for him.

Green-One’s module into the manse’s systems works only at 12:30 sharp, the door to the back kitchen clicking open smoothly and Rain disappearing inside. It’s quiet, still, whitewash and wood and the ocean soft through each window. Every door is left unlocked, save for two—the basement and the main bedroom. Green-One’s words echo: “What appears to be will not always be so.” The leader of Polaris is a master of subterfuge, evading the recordkeepers, the king’s guards, and every assassin guild on the Station for more than a decade now. The basement would be a logical place to hide evidence, but the leader does not strictly follow logic; madness is far more difficult to predict.

Rain wanders the halls, an uneasy feeling in his gut. If Green-One knew about Yavn when he gave him the module, there’s every chance he only halfway disabled this manse’s security systems, leaving Rain a sitting duck for whatever authorities could be streaming his way right now. The work must be fast. But where? The entire manse could be a hiding spot.

Eyes, ears, nose open—all of his senses focus on the creaks and groans of the wood. And then he notices it. Every room in the manse has some sort of decorative mirror—except the sitting room. The most obvious room, but Rain knows the most obvious is also the least obvious. He is not smart, not like Green-One or the leader of Polaris. But he knows—from years of maintaining his dagger, from years of using it on prey in puddles and against stainless steel doors—that, in reflections and up close, hard-light always has a faint rainbow hue around it, like the distortion of a heat wave.

He snatches a mirror from the wall of the bathroom and scans the sitting room. Nothing. Every wall is real. Not the walls, then. He aims down, step by slow step, and his chest swells when he sees the haze around a square section beneath a rug—just big enough for someone to squeeze through. It’s not active hard-light—no heat, no plasma—and so it’s easily breached with a bowl of water, the plane fizzing away to reveal a ladder leading into blue-lit dimness.

Getting into the room is not difficult—it is understanding what is inside that is.

His eyes skirt around the cubicle, the walls lined with real paper diagrams. Of what, he can’t tell, but he snaps pictures on his vis all the same, pictures that automatically send to Green-One. The same image repeats: a circle bull’s-eyed with other circles within. In the very center circle, the leader has written a word—MOTHER. Not just in one diagram—in the dead center of all the diagrams, the word MOTHER blares back at Rain.

An acronym, maybe? Or the real thing? If the leader’s mother is being kept somewhere against her will, it would explain his motives. Nobles do strange things to one another all the time, and starting a rebellion for revenge is not out of the question, but the wrong would have to have been committed at least ten years ago, when the leader first began appearing. A name floats to his mind: Draviticus—the crown prince. This manse belongs to House Lithroi, and he is the only one left of them. Which means the overloaded rider Green-One located in the hospital must’ve been…

Rain goes rigid. There’s a holoscreen on the wall, blue and humming, and he reads it: FRIGATE-CLASS A3 HEAVENBREAKER. A diagram of a familiar steed. DESTROYER-CLASS A4 HELLRUNNER. Another diagram. Math scrawled everywhere. He looks up at the numbers, looks down at the papers, and then up again at the hologram of two rusted steeds floating in space behind the shadow of an asteroid just off the Station’s perimeter, their hands clasped together and hundreds of half-visible, fanged tentacles writhing out of their cockpits.

He is not Green-One, but even he can understand.

He has to tell Synali. Stop her from riding any more. Green-One, their mission, he has to tell her, and his mind goes blank. There is no way she knows—no way Draviticus has told her. She is trying to win the Supernova Cup, but it will kill her.

The prince’s plan will kill them all.

He’s never climbed a ladder faster, papers falling like ash in his wake, and one of the many falls to the ground with a sentence scribbled in its margins.

I am the one who raises the dead

and gives them life again.