“Want another?”
Timony nodded to the bartender, a short and scruffy Pakistani man she’d seen behind the bar before—Tadeen was his name, maybe?—and he was a decent enough option to take home if no one else in the bar panned out. The idea of that—a distraction—felt so good in her head right about now. Like a vacation from the world. It was a familiar, sad feeling, Timony noted. She let the fantasy play in her mind for a few more seconds.
The truth was, she felt shaken by what had happened with Sandwyn, and she didn’t want to be alone.
She gave another sweep around the half-empty dive. Alamo looked bad in the light and somehow worse in the dark, like the shadows were sucking you right into the corners of the tight space. Even worse? In those occasional pools of jaundiced light, she couldn’t make out anyone less than thirty years her senior.
Tadeen placed another glass of vodka in front of her, and Timony smiled a knowing smile and mouthed, “Thanks.”
Tadeen raised an eyebrow but offered no response beyond that, instead moving toward the opening door, preparing to dole out another drink.
Fine. Timony pulled out her phone and texted Osman: Done with your errand?
If she tried really hard, she could convince herself she was reaching out because she needed someone to compare notes with. He’d heard the signal, too.
The truth was, she didn’t want to go home by herself. The idea of her empty apartment put her teeth on edge. She didn’t have to sleep with him, but Timony knew sitting in the dark alone was less than ideal.
She waited for some kind of response. She spun her mental contact list, thinking of potential colleagues she could talk to. Most of them weren’t on speaking terms with her. She considered Slade for a second, her former protégé. Slade was the US’s top field agent now.
Slade would definitely know what was going on.
But Timony wasn’t willing to sink that low. Not yet. She slapped down her phone.
What the hell was going on at the Bazaar?
She picked up her phone again. If anyone knew, it would be Miranda Slade. Her former protégé, now one of the company’s top agents. And there might still be enough goodwill lingering there that Slade would be willing to offer some intel.
Maybe.
But the unbearable pain of going hat in hand to the woman she trained to basically take over her dream job was not something she was ready to consider. No. Not three drinks in.
Four would be better. Probably five.
“How do you drink that stuff?” came a voice from behind her.
“Like this,” Timony said, throwing the glass back. It tasted like vinegar mixed with something dead, but it did the job.
She turned to the voice and found Senator Antwan Tobin, his rumpled suit covering his large frame.
Tobin was in his midfifties, and had occupied a seat in the Interstellar Union Senate for close to two decades. His face looked worn and tired, but his eyes were sharp. If Timony was a spy, which she still felt like she was, Tobin was her congressional equivalent—a man who knew the inner workings of government so well he could bend the Interstellar Union to his will with a phone call. No one got elected without Tobin’s blessing, and few presidents survived a term without his support. He was the connective tissue that kept New Destiny alive. He also seemed to have a soft spot for her.
Timony didn’t recall when they’d become friends. She guessed it was around the time of the failed assassination. Tobin had been part of President Warren’s entourage that day, and the bomb that was supposed to take out the leader of the free world would’ve certainly shredded Tobin in the process. Maybe Tobin felt like he owed Timony something. Maybe Timony had the one thing that seemed to get Tobin’s antennae up: intel. For someone in his position, it didn’t hurt to have a source in the Bazaar, desk jockey or not.
Still, him being here was a little like seeing a priest in a whorehouse.
“What brings you all the way out here? Just felt like slumming it?” Timony asked. “I imagine you’d prefer a place with a working bathroom.”
Tobin smiled.
“A drink is a drink, no matter where you get it.” He waved over Tadeen. “Whiskey, neat. Whatever you have from Earth.” He nodded toward Timony. “Make it two.”
Tadeen whistled, not recognizing Tobin. Timony smiled. It was hard to get good whiskey on New Destiny. Whiskey needed to be aged in barrels, which needed wood, which was almost impossible to find on New Destiny and in dwindling supply on Earth.
Tadeen managed to scare up a dusty bottle from the back end of the top shelf and poured two anemic glasses, sliding them over gently. Tobin threw his back and proffered his glass for another, while Timony savored the woody sting, the notes of citrus and vanilla.
“Hell of a night, huh?” Tobin said. “I’m hearing a lot of things. But first off, how are you holding up? Seems like they kept you for a while.”
“I’m fine,” Timony said with a shrug before polishing off the rest of the drink. She turned to face Tobin, sizing him up. “Not sure what you’re asking me about.”
Tobin scoffed.
“Come on, Corin, I’m not some newborn babe. I hear things. I have sources. I know you got cornered at work today,” Tobin said, his voice lowering as he leaned in slightly. She could smell the fresh whiskey on his breath. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. I need you to confirm it. If you can’t, I can find someone who will.”
Timony shrugged. She didn’t have the energy or desire to spar with Tobin. And fuck Sandwyn.
“It’s big, that’s all I know,” she said.
“A message,” Tobin said. “From the Mosaic.”
“Yup. We got a distress signal, but it got pulled back, almost immediately. Why the hell would you send out a distress signal and then backtrack with zero explanation?”
Tobin contemplated his drink. He really didn’t know what was going on. This was news to him. “Well, the wire is quite rudimentary—”
“It’s not smoke signals, Senator,” Timony said, her voice slurring slightly on the last word. “They went dead quiet after those two messages, and it left me looking like I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. If I never see Sandwyn again, it’d be too—”
“Sandwyn was there? He questioned you?”
“Yes,” Timony said, brow furrowing.
“That’s unexpected,” Tobin said, smirking to himself. He held his glass in one hand, swirling the last sip. “What did the messages say? What was it about? The black site?”
There’d been rumors swirling around intelligence circles about a secret weapons cache tucked away past Pluto, but Timony had chalked it up to creative gossip. Hearing Tobin mention it so glibly gave her pause. But that was a future Timony problem. She was worried about something else.
Timony recounted as best she could—the messages, but also the interrogation. Probably more than she should offer in one sitting, but she was angry and drunk. And Tobin was trustworthy: besides the friendly-grandpa vibe, he was a man who understood the importance of secrets.
“That’s a lot to process,” Tobin said. “And I’m always around for a bit of gossip, but I came here for a reason. I need to talk to you.”
Timony steeled herself. She felt off-balance. Not just from the drink but from the meeting. Tobin wasn’t one to socialize. They weren’t friends—their relationship was symbiotic. They each got something from the other. That’s as far as it went. If it inched further in either direction, they’d be in trouble. He was here to find her, and that couldn’t be good. This was starting to feel a touch more familiar than she was used to.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Adan,” Tobin said, his voice flat.
Bad news, Timony thought.
Adan was her . . . something. Ex? Formerly known as her fiancé? The man she expected to marry, but who had seemed quite happy to find an excuse not to?
Like everything else in her life, the relationship went south about a year ago, when she was caught buying doses of Boost—a lab-created amphetamine drug that not only kept you up for forty-eight hours straight but made the whole thing fun as hell—from her childhood best friend, Jose Carriles. Adan was so straight edge that he barely drank coffee. It was almost charming to Timony at first—that this stiff rule follower was turned on by Corin Timony, a perpetual hot mess—but the novelty had started to wear off by that point, and the disaster she’d created for herself only gave him the out he’d probably been craving for months.
A few weeks after she was demoted from her former job at the Bazaar to the one she had now, she found herself paying all the rent on a Texas 2 studio apartment. She’d come to terms with it, or so she told herself. These things happen.
She hadn’t called him in well over a month, at least not that she could remember. Each call was just another message on the pile of unanswered “please call me I miss you” recordings that would destroy her self-esteem if she ever listened to them.
And then he died.
Training exercise. Adan was a pilot, and he was scheduled to be the lead on Mosaic. It was during preparations for the mission on the lunar surface when his EVA suit blew. By that point, her pain outweighed her regret. She didn’t even cry when she heard the news, just sat on her bed for most of the day, memorizing the stains on the wall. Then she went out and got drunk.
Grief was complicated, and never linear.
The real insult was when Carriles swept in to take Adan’s empty pilot seat at the last second. It was bad enough that he only got a slap on the wrist for distribution, while Timony’s career was ruined for simple possession. Now he was out piloting the greatest mission in human history while Adan was dead and she was stuck at a desk.
But that’s the way life works when your mother is a celebrated Martian senator.
“What about Adan?” Timony asked.
Tobin looked around the bar. It had emptied further, and Tadeen was on the other end, cleaning glasses. At least they had privacy.
“I don’t think his death was an accident.”
The words hung in the air, formless. Timony wasn’t even sure how to process them.
Did that mean someone killed Adan? Mr. Straight-Edge-Never-Did-Anything-Wrong Adan? And why now, months later, was Tobin, of all people, coming to her with this? Timing was as important as the message, she knew—and this timing was very suspect.
Sensing her questions, he put up his hand. “There was a report, after he died. That he’d been . . . under the influence of something. Routine safety inspection was also forged. Someone made all that disappear. I don’t know who and I can’t even make a guess.” He sat back heavily in the chair. “You’re a good agent. You saved my life. I know this is a lot. But I felt like you deserved to know. I’m sorry if this . . . I don’t know . . .”
He finished his drink and put down the glass.
“So I had Oneida, my assistant, track you down,” Tobin said. “I just felt like I needed to tell you this in person.”
“Bullshit,” Timony said. “I know how the game is played. You didn’t come here because you felt like you owed me something. You came here because you wanted something.”
Tobin nodded. “I guess I’m just curious about what happened. I wish I knew. But I find the most helpful question to ask in a situation like this, when you don’t have a clear answer, is: Who benefits?”
“So, what? You want me to find out what happened to Adan? Way to swing by and dump a ton of shit on my—”
“That’s not what I said,” Tobin said, his tone suddenly stern, scolding. “I thought you’d want to know. That’s all. What you do with it, if you do anything, is up to you.”
The senator looked at his watch. Timony watched his eyes, could tell he wasn’t really looking at anything, just hoping for an easy exit. He placed a fingerprint on the reader near his drink. She heard a slight beep, signaling that his account had been charged. He smiled at Timony softly.
“It’s been a long day,” he said. “Try to get some rest. Sleep this off. I don’t want to hear that you just . . . kept going.”
Kept going. She knew what he meant, and hated him for it. Please don’t continue to get more fucked up, okay, you helpless grown woman? Timony had heard that tone from too many people, too many times. She’d like to think she’d become numb to it, but the truth was, it just shamed her. Made her feel lesser than, and she wanted to strangle Antwan Tobin right there.
But she couldn’t. Because she had to think.
She mumbled something as Tobin leaned in for an awkward hug. She could smell his oily cologne, could feel his five o’clock shadow scraping against her skin. The sensation trailed into something else, an urge to take any kind of closeness she could get in this moment, and she felt ashamed over that, too.
Tobin turned and left the bar. He might have said goodbye. Timony wasn’t sure. By the time she reconnected with where she was, though, he was gone. Tadeen had refilled her glass. With the cheap stuff, thankfully. She grabbed it and took a long, thirsty pull.
“One thing went right today,” she said, shaking her head.
She polished off the drink and placed the glass on the bar, heard it land, harder than she’d intended. She let her feet reach the floor, gave herself a few extra seconds to find balance, then slowly walked toward the exit. As she walked, she checked her phone one last time; no response from Osman.
Fine.
Corin Timony was used to this—the lonely, drunken half-waltz home. She was used to bracing for the headache and tumult of the morning, coated with liquor and hazy memories.
One thing she wasn’t used to? This much subterfuge in one night, and not having a single damn sense of where she stood on any of it.
Who benefits from Adan’s death?
What was Tobin trying to tell her?
Her head was too fuzzy to make sense of it.
As she made her way down the block, she passed an O₂ regulator—designed to scrub carbon dioxide from the air and look like a modernist nightmare interpretation of a tree, all harsh angles and garish browns and greens. Normally they softly hummed and cast a faint glow at night, but this one was dark, construction tape wrapped around the trunk.
Whole place is falling apart, she thought to herself.
As Timony walked by the regulator device, she realized she was holding her breath.
She exhaled hard, breathed in, and gazed at the dome above her that looked out onto the blackness of space. Somewhere out there, the Mosaic was barreling toward its destination: a habitable planet, a place where humanity could potentially expand to. Earth and New Destiny had reached an inflection point of sorts. Both places were packed beyond capacity with limited options. The small colonies on Mars and Titan were already overloaded, and there were few, if any, hospitable options left to choose from. Humanity needed room to breathe.
But a new planet? A new planet where people could set up shop? It was the next major milestone for the human race. A new beginning. She wondered what they would find there. A new start certainly sounded nice. Maybe she’d hang a shingle.
Or just show up to give Carriles a solid crack in the jaw.
Assuming the ship and its crew were still in one piece. Who even knew at this point?
The longer she stared through the dome, into all that nothing, the dizzier she felt. There was something about the enormity of it, all that space out there, that made her head spin.
It made her feel alone.
She snapped back when she heard a shuffle and a step behind her. She wasn’t so drunk she’d miss being tailed. Was she?
Even though it was off-route, she took a sharp turn at the next corner, allowing her the space to glance behind her, to see if someone was actually following.
The street was empty.
Timony shook her head. She was off. Must’ve been the booze.
She buried her instincts and kept walking, her shuffle slightly off-balance.