Welcome,” Podlove said, looking for all the world like some combination of hotel concierge and mad sea captain. Soq could see the uncertainty in his eyes. Go had been correct—he was a banker, not a fighter.
“Ahoy,” Go said.
They stared at each other across the opulent lobby of Podlove’s corporate headquarters. Salt crystals everywhere. Sharp and sparkling. Intended to impress and intimidate. Behind them, across the glass, Arm One traffic was reaching its early-morning peak.
But the place would be bristling with well-hidden weaponry. Podlove was confident, secure in the familiar center of his universe, but he wasn’t stupid. He would have fearsome muscle in his corner. Drones and bots and autoturrets.
Soq shut their eyes, and they could see it. Could recall the schematics, taste the bite of the drill bit installing a toxin pod. Remembered her name, the woman who’d led up the installation six years back. Knew that she was dead.
Two flunkies stood behind Podlove. Go had two of her own. Soq, and the brass-knuckled soldier whose name they had never gotten.
And, between the rival parties, the man with the sack over his head.
Swallowing, finding their mouth so dry it was almost impossible to do so, Soq felt the full gravity of the situation. If anything went wrong, they would be right in the line of fire. What kind of guns and blades and projectiles and lasers were aimed at them right this second? Podlove flashed a frigid snake smile, savage and cynical all at once, but Soq could see that he was scared. And that was scary. Because scared people were dangerous. Soq made eye contact with one of Podlove’s flunkies, a scrawny thing who looked as frightened as Soq felt, and gave him a little smile, at which he snarled.
Soq stood up straighter.
They’d been frightened, at first, after they’d learned Go was their mother. They’d feared losing their objectivity, letting their emotions and the personal bond between them render Go perfect, special, beyond reproach. And while Soq was happy to be a henchperson, they knew that flunkies who thought their employer was always right started making dumb decisions.
The opposite had happened. Rage, not love, tinted how Soq saw Go. The woman had abandoned Soq. Every awful thing that had happened in Soq’s life could be laid at Go’s feet.
Either way, Soq’s objectivity was compromised, and that was a problem.
But maybe objectivity wasn’t everything. Maybe it wasn’t even real. Soq’s head buzzed with a hundred different takes on objective reality, and—coolly, effortlessly—they could compare the times two people remembered the same things differently. Both convinced they were right. Soq could see Go as a dozen people saw her—cruel bully, magnanimous boss, ignorant grid-grunt upstart.
Go didn’t know what Soq knew: that Ora and Masaaraq and Ankit and Kaev were on their way over. To complicate matters. Soq had meant to tell Go, and now was glad they hadn’t.
“Is this how you dreamed it would be, when you got to the top?” Podlove said.
“This isn’t the top,” Go said.
“No. I suppose it’s not. But it’s as high as you’ll get. This ends today.”
“I told you, we’re on the same page.”
“This is him?” Podlove said, advancing to the sack-headed man. “I’m not going to pull this off and find a lit stick of dynamite?”
Go moved to unmask the man, but Podlove stopped her with a gentle hand.
“A curious play, at the Cabinet,” he said. “Taking all those people. What could you possibly plan to do with them, little girl?”
“Maybe I want to found a city of my own,” Go said.
It had given Soq hope, when Go finally agreed to Soq’s plan. Liberate not just Ora, but every Cabinet prisoner who wished to be liberated. Which had turned out to be a far higher number than projected—Soq had imagined that most would be too afraid to choose a rusty crime syndicate ship over the safe warmth of their prison. They were still belowdecks on Go’s rusty freighter. Still frightened. But free.
The second part of Soq’s plan was still up in the air. Waiting on Go to give the go-ahead, which she might never do. Run Podlove’s program, the one Soq got from his grandson, the software that would tell them the location and access code of every empty unit being kept off the market by every shareholder, and move those people in. And then head out to Arm Eight and offer a place to every grid rat and box sleeper and overcrowded unhealthy unregistered resident. Move them from disgusting and precarious housing to impossible luxury. Balance the scales.
Found a city within the city.
A city of my own.
A city where Go was the sole shareholder.
Of course, Go wasn’t being altruistic. Soq could see that now. Go would want money, maybe just a little at first, but more and more, and Go had plenty of unbreakable men and women to drag you out of your place if you couldn’t afford it. And then rent those fancy spaces to people who could afford to pay through the nose . . . once Go got a taste of that, it wouldn’t be long before all those box sleepers were back in the boxes, and the empty units were full of one more wave of wealthy refugees. Being a landlord was the biggest racket in town, in every town, in every city, across history, and when Soq ran that software they’d be handing Go a massive empire.
We’re on the same page.
How would Go be different from Podlove, from every other rich and powerful player who sucked the blood of the poor, made them pay until they couldn’t pay anymore and then pushed them into the sea to sink? Soq doubted there’d be any difference at all.
The question was, what could Soq do about it?
Podlove pulled the sack off Barron’s head.
“Hello again,” he said.
Barron smiled. “You don’t look so good, friend. You look . . . unhinged.”
“I’m going to unhinge you,” Podlove said, and there was the fear again, the uncertainty. He wasn’t Go. Threats and violence were not his native soil. His own rage frightened him. “Like a door. Take you apart like a jigsaw puzzle going back in the box.”
Barron’s smile only widened. “I know.”
“Laugh as long as you can. Pretty soon you won’t be able to. Because you won’t have lips, a tongue, most of the skin on your body.”
“It was way too easy to turn you into a medieval barbarian,” Barron said. “You, who always believed yourself to be so civilized. Another way I achieve victory over you.”
Podlove put the sack back on and turned to Go. “Was there anything else?”
“No, sir,” Go said, bowing in exaggerated deference. Exaggerated, but still real. Go really did admire him. She really did want to be him.
“I’ll be in touch. Once I’ve gotten a little more information out of this one, and I can assess how to proceed.”
“Of course. I’ll wait to hear from you. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”
They did not shake hands. But they smiled, and Soq saw oceans of information surge in that smile. They were the same. Go didn’t want to burn down anything. She might kill Podlove, but not because she hated him. Because she wanted to take his place.
Soq had been there. In Podlove’s place—in Fill’s. Physically, but more important, emotionally. The breaks had taken Soq there. They knew how empty all that comfort felt, how little it helped to hold off the dark.
Once, Soq had wanted to be what Go was. To have power, to have wealth, no matter who else got hurt. To plunge the rest of the city burning and screaming into the sea, if that’s what it took. Soq didn’t want that anymore.
It was stupid. Soq knew it was stupid. Soq did it anyway. A plan was in place, dependent on a delicate balance barely preserved. The balance demanded that Soq wait to run the software. That’s what Go had told Soq to do. Go had been very clear about what to do and when.
Fuck Go, Soq thought.
Six swift taps on the palate and against the inside of Soq’s cheek, and it was done.
Everything happened far faster than they’d anticipated. They’d imagined that, if it worked at all, the decades-dormant software would take some time to get started, to trigger whatever safeguards and tripwire warnings might be set up, to say nothing of how Podlove would get word—but only eight seconds passed after Soq triggered the savage break-in software that Podlove had given to his grandson, that Fill had unwittingly given to Soq along with the breaks . . .
The old man’s head jerked sharply, like he’d heard his name called from a great distance. He shut his eyes and listened to something his implant said. Then he opened them.
“You fucking idiot,” he hissed to Go.
“What?” she said, her inveterate smugness certainly damning her in his eyes.
Above them, lights flickered. Sirens began to wail. The software read updates into Soq’s ear. It had been detected by a monitoring bot, one of millions of ancient defense systems lurking in the municipal infrastructure, set up by the shareholders to check their little monster—by releasing an identical copy.
One of them was bad enough. Two of them, running in a state of open warfare, might make the city melt.
Glass shattered. Soq dropped to their knees, convinced this was it, Podlove would have triggered the bullets or explosives or whatever other weaponry had been trained on them for the entire parley. And maybe he had, but the system was not responsive. Most systems, it seemed, were not responsive. A whole lot of people were yelling out on the grid.
“Podlove, I swear . . .” Go said, her eyes terrified.
And nothing and nobody tried to stop Masaaraq and Ora and Kaev and Liam from breaking the front windows, walking right into the Salt Cave, armed and angry, and heading straight for Martin Podlove.