JAL
Nash led the breakaway. Quick little spit—she took off, spring-loaded, tugging Anke beside her as they darted deeper into the bustle of the market. Mean mugs and meaner mouths chased them through the crowd, but Nash didn’t miss a step, and she didn’t let Anke miss any, either.
“Hang back,” Saint told him, holding at a jog as the girls ran out ahead. “Watch.”
“Ain’t my first foot chase, old man,” Jal said gruffly. Just because he’d been out of the loop a while didn’t mean he’d forgotten everything he knew. It was a shell game. Saint had the tags, so as far as they knew, the mercs were visual-contact-only on Anke and Nash. All they had to do was give them something else to look at long enough to shuffle Anke off the board, and she and Nash would be home free. They needed a distraction.
Reckon you’ll do, Jal thought, eyeing the shifty son of a bitch at the brew cart. He didn’t disappoint. As the girls sped by, Shifty elbowed past his drinking buddies like he couldn’t get after them fast enough. He hesitated, though. A moment’s indecision—follow or don’t, blow his cover or keep it. Happened to the best of them, but sometimes it only took a moment.
It was all Jal needed.
“Want this one?” Like Saint knew exactly what he was thinking.
“Yes, sir.” He really, really did, and there’d be no hesitation from him. From a jog to an all-out sprint in the span of a few footfalls, and the merc had scarcely taken his first step away from the cart when Jal slammed into him from behind. All that speed, thrown behind all that mass—that kind of impact rattled your teeth, crumpled your lungs. It staggered Jal a step or two, but he was made of sterner stuff than that.
The merc, not so much. He got checked clear off his feet, crashing into a stack of crates by the cart with an eruption of splintered wood and shattering glass. Broken bottles spewed brew across the streets in waves of mulchy green. Cheap stuff; he could smell it. Reeked like acetone and seawater and burnt sugar. Used to be a mystery to Jal, how Saint could drink the stuff. He always had that flask of his within reach, especially when the days got quiet. You don’t drink rotgut for the taste, kid, he’d said the first time Jal tried a swig. The way he’d laughed, thumping the sputters from Jal’s chest as he breathed through the burn.… He never said what he did drink it for, but after so many nights waking to choked breaths and the rattle of the flask cap in shaking fingers, even Jal could fill in those blanks.
In some ways, for all their years apart, he understood Saint better now than he ever had when they’d worked together.
The cart owner still hadn’t stopped cussing when Saint caught up. Saint clapped Jal crisply on the shoulder and said, “That’ll just about do,” and Jal grinned like a fool for the three whole seconds it took to remember it wasn’t his battle buddy running beside him. It was the self-righteous bastard who’d damned him all the way down and hadn’t even stopped to tell him why.
Well fuck that, and fuck him. Jal ducked away, dodging a woman with a basket of fruit as she crossed in front of him. Not the Weald’s first foot chase, either. Between the pickpockets and the stray kids filching food, the Weald always had somebody doing a grab and run, and somebody else chasing them. Folks didn’t even blink as he and Saint went tearing past.
“You got eyes on Nash and Anke?” Saint asked him. Straight back on-mission, like he hadn’t even noticed the brush-off.
Probably easier that way. The next foothold. “Nah, think I lost them.” The crowd got thicker up ahead, where the narrow, winding throat of the market opened wide to a sea of thatch-roofed stalls and thrown-together tables. Hawkers’ Gulley. Hadn’t changed a bit since he saw it last: same two-and three-story clay buildings stacked into the root beds, circling hundreds of rickety stands and carts thrown together like jacks in the basin of a dried-up ravine. A dense weave of roots and rope bridges overhead trapped the muggy heat inside and echoed back the mad din of peddling and haggling and outright bickering. A man could hardly hear himself think.
In the middle of it all, in the only spot not staked by some jeweler or potter or metalworker, a lagoon teemed with every-color ferns and vines and little croaking reptiles that scraped moss off the rocks with their keratin beaks. Tch-tch, tch-tch. A little oasis of peace in the chaos. Plenty of benches for sitting, and rocks for climbing, for anyone not too shy of heights. There was a spot right near the top of the formation, maybe eighty decs up, where you could sit and see the whole Gulley. The hiss of the lagoon’s waterfall drowned out some of the noise; the flowering ivy, some of the smell. Great spot to people-watch.
A better spot not to bother with people at all.
His earpiece crackled. “Think we’re clear,” Nash said over the comms, sharp and focused and grounding. Easy to get overwhelmed there. Wasn’t just the memories, but the sights, the sounds, the smells, all dialed up by his mutations. He was made for dark and dry and empty, for everything Sooner’s Weald wasn’t. Once the novelty of his first rotation had worn off, he’d seen it for the cruel trick it was, sending someone like him someplace like that. “We’re gonna loop around and head for the port.” The market curved in one big, meandering circle—more efficient that way. Kept the traffic moving, no bottlenecks, and it worked in their crew’s favor. Gave them plenty of room to run. “You guys okay? We heard shit breaking.”
“All good,” Saint said, but as he and Jal hit the first of the stalls, Jal risked a glance over his shoulder. Shifty from the brew cart charged through the crowd behind them, drenched in green with murder in his eyes. One by one, though, Jal marked more of them. Three. No, four, like comets cutting tracks through a junk belt, shoving shoppers out of their way and toppling tables and displays without breaking pace. Fucking juggernauts. Caps were awfully good motivation.
“That’s a fuck-load of mercs,” he called to Saint. Outfit his ass; they had the whole wardrobe. Now it’s a party. His grin came back with a vengeance. “Might want to pick up the pace, old man. This way!” He took the lead, weaving between an herbalist and a palm reader’s tent and banking into the next row. Couldn’t smoke them too bad, not yet. Had to keep the mercs’ attention a little longer, buy Anke and Nash a better head start, but that didn’t mean they had to make it easy on them.
“Take it down a click, speedy,” Saint called after him. “You trying to shake me, too?”
“You’re fine.” He’d always kept up all right for a normie, and Jal had a plan that didn’t involve soft-shoeing it. Tight squeeze. Tighter than he remembered. People packed themselves into the narrow aisles shoulder to shoulder, bumping and jostling Jal from every side as he slid through gaps in the traffic. Anticipation was everything. Reading faces, body language—a glance to the left, a barely-there turn of a foot, and he could slip past them in the space they left behind.
Hot air filled his lungs like bellows, beads of sweat dripping down his face and heart rate climbing in his ears. Felt good. Felt fucking amazing, really letting loose like that. Not a lot of chances to do it, the past few years.
He hit a break in the crowd and remembered to glance back. “Still there, Saint?” A cart or two back, Saint answered him with a red-faced scowl and a one-fingered salute. Attaboy. Wouldn’t work if he fell behind, and it was working. Behind Saint, the handful of mercs kept hot on their trail, shoving their way through the dense crowd. Not so good at anticipating, those guys. They pushed, and they shouted, and stall after stall, row after row, they fought their way upstream. Shifty, the woman in the cap, a tall one with a whole-ass art gallery of tattoos—Jal tried to keep track of all of them as he plotted his course through the Gulley.
“Leggy bastard,” Saint panted in his ear. Too far back to hear him over the crowd, but the comms carried it just fine. “Fucking hate running.”
Jal’s cheeks ached from all the smiling. Damn the mercs, and damn this end-of-the-world bullshit; after the string of years he’d had, he’d take his fun where he could find it. “I know you do.” Even so, he used to jog with Jal when they were stationed together, and it seemed like he’d kept in the habit. Guy still had some staying power. “Just hang in there.” They’d nearly crossed the Gulley. Up ahead, the stalls gave way to the first clay storefronts, and Jal figured it was time to make shit happen.
Out of the corner of his eye, he found what he was looking for. A gap between a restaurant and a repair shop; they’d named it like a street, gave it the little plaque and everything, but alley would’ve been a better fit. Cluttered and cramped, winding around behind the restaurant to a stack of cheap housing units built up all the way to the top of the ravine. “Up there,” he called to Saint, cutting left toward the restaurant. A man selling real paper journals shot him a venomous look as Jal vaulted over the end of his table. One last stream of bodies to cross, and he ducked into the alley.
Smoke and steam belched through the restaurant windows, thick with the sweet scent of roasting vegetables and fresh dough. He remembered that place, used to eat there a lot during his rotation at the Weald. Cheap food that stuck to the ribs, and a pretty cook who’d managed not to laugh when he’d tried his hand at flirting.
“Stop!” Saint called from the mouth of the alley, but Jal turned the corner and kept running. In the light of dozens of buzzing neons, the housing stacks seemed to stretch on forever. Little windows and balconies strung with technicolor bottles and strips of cloth and anything else folks could think of to make the cookie-cutter units feel a little more like home. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember which one they’d stayed in all those years ago. Saint probably could’ve. He’d always had a better head for that sort of thing, but he seemed too busy hollering at Jal to pay much mind. “Goddamn it, Jal, you know this street’s—”
Jal stopped in front of the very last stack in the row, boots sliding on the damp ground. It was always damp back there. No place for the breeze to pass, with the stacks on one side, the restaurant on the other, and at the end of the alley, a towering wall of roots strung between them. Too dense to pass, and nothing but clay mud and trickling water on the other side.
END OF THE LINE, someone had spray-painted on a sheet of scrap metal. It’d been up for so long that half the letters had faded, and the sign hung lopsided and rusty on the roots. It’d looked the same when Jal lived there, though, so it might just outlast them all.
Behind him, he heard Saint turn the corner and slow. “—a dead end,” he finished when he finally laid eyes on the roots. Like some part of him had hoped he’d misremembered, and he didn’t want to speak it ’til he knew it was true. There it was, though. End of the line. In the neon lights, Jal watched his face pass from confusion to disbelief to wild-eyed fury. Just his luck, it stopped there, and Saint charged forward. “You knew,” he spat, closing the distance one long, pointed stride at a time. “You knew what this was. You knew where you were taking us. What was the plan, Jalsen? Corral ’em here with me so you can give us all the slip?”
Saint only used his full name when he was special mad. Old habits, huh?
“What was the plan?” Saint demanded, louder. Harsher. Closer. Jal couldn’t quite help flinching as Saint’s hands balled to fists at his sides; decent odds the only thing stopping the old man from using them was the shrinking space between them.
Jal raised his hands. “They won’t kill you,” he said in a rush. “Not right away.”
“How reassuring.” Saint held on to his temper by a thread, but with the sound of approaching footsteps echoing down the alley, Jal could hear it fraying.
The next step Saint took, Jal took one back. “They’ll have questions. You’ll have time,” he said. “Do you trust me?”
He thought he knew what the answer would be. That well had run dry between them a long, long time ago, and steering Saint down a dead-end street with a half-dozen mercs on their asses wouldn’t do a hell of a lot to fill it back up.
But Saint … the man always did surprise him. He stopped, and Jal swore he unfurled his fists finger by white-knuckled finger. The anger hadn’t left his eyes, but something else tempered it. He looked tired, all of a sudden. Tired to his bones, and wounded, and hopeful, and it pulled at something in Jal’s chest he couldn’t bear to look at too closely.
“I want to,” Saint said.
It was a better answer than either of them deserved.
“Good,” Jal said. “Remember that.” He took a few more steps back, dropped the bags, and ran straight at the housing stack. Sixty decs of damp clay before so much as a balcony rail stuck out to grab onto, but it wasn’t about height or grade; it was about timing. Bounding up the wall one, two, three steps and feeling the instant when the momentum started to shift, when gravity started to pull harder than inertia could push. He launched himself off his last step, flinging his arms up high over his head. At the very top of his jump—there. His fingers met hard, rusted metal and he grabbed on tight, hauling himself up the rest of the way onto the balcony.
“What’s going on?” he heard Eoan say over the comms as he got his feet on the railing and launched himself up to the next row up. “Is he running?” The patch on his neck burned. His gut lurched. Seventy, eighty decs now, and if the captain hit the trigger on those nanites, shocked his legs numb, the fall wouldn’t kill him, but he wouldn’t get back up in a hurry. “Should I—”
“Don’t!” Saint snapped as Jal finally got high enough. He twisted himself around, heels on the bottom rails and hands stretched out behind him holding on to the top. The alley swooped maybe a hundred decs below him, and on the other side, the hard clay roof of the restaurant looked about as inviting as a swift kick in the nards. “Let him go, Cap.”
Jal couldn’t guess if he’d decided to trust him, or he just had enough fondness left not to want him splattered on the alley floor, but he appreciated it either way. Up that high, everything was clearer. The first merc rounding the corner at the other end of the alley. Saint staring up at him with his hand over his face, and goddamn if that didn’t bring back memories.
If you hate watching me climb so much, why don’t you just look away? They must’ve been in the lagoon that day, because Jal still remembered the tch-tch of the mosseaters’ beaks when Saint’d said, Because, goddamn it, if I’m not looking, I can’t catch you.
He knew leaving Saint to the wolves wasn’t a gamble he had any right making, but he knew he had to do it just the same.
“Really should’ve given me that gun, old man,” he said, and with his eyes fixed firm on the roof ahead, he jumped.
ANKE
Nash grasped Anke’s hand as they wove their way up the street. Not quite running, not quite walking—the kind of pace meant to get them someplace quickly, without drawing too many eyes. It was pretty much impossible to feel safe at a time like this, but at the very least Anke knew she was in good hands.
Hah. Literally.
“Saint?” Nash called. She must’ve heard the same stuff Anke heard over the comms, and from the pinch of her brows, she didn’t like it. She seemed to like it even less when the line went quiet. “You all right over there?”
“He’s handling things,” Eoan answered. Which Anke took to be their very diplomatic way of saying, Shit’s bad, but you’ve got your own problems. “I’ve split the channels. I’ll stay in touch with him; you focus on getting Anke to the ship.”
Anke could practically hear Nash grinding her teeth. Shouldn’t do that, she wanted to say. You’ll get cavities. This really didn’t seem like the time for dental health tips, though, so she kept it to herself.
“So help me, if that schist-eating lunkhead ditched him, I’ll feed him his fucking eyeballs,” Nash growled.
“Oh-kay,” Anke squeaked as Nash’s grip tightened on her hand. No problem; she could tough it out. What was a little finger-breaking between friends? “Little graphic but, uh, really gets the point across. You know, I’m sure everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about, just a little—” Nope, she had to tap out. “OhmyGodyou’recrushingmyhand.”
Nash looked down at their clasped hands. “Sorry.” And she didn’t let go, but she loosened her grip a little. Nothing in danger of breaking or falling off, so Anke was good with the compromise. To tell the truth, she didn’t really want her to let go. “You’re right. He’ll be fine, and if he isn’t, he’s next in line when I’m done with Jal.”
“For the eyeball thing?”
“I’ll start with that, sure.”
Anke pursed her lips, trying to think of a response that wasn’t have you tried talking to someone, professionally? She settled on saying, “You have a unique way of expressing concern.”
“I’m not concerned.” Also not a very good liar, but Anke was definitely not going to be the one to tell her that. Maybe better to let her focus on keeping their arses alive. “We’re close,” Nash told Eoan. “I can see the port gates.”
This side of the gates didn’t look so grand, if you asked Anke, but they were tall enough to spot through the dense cover of trees ahead. The music played louder there at the end of the market; compensating for the roar of engines, maybe, or just trying to discourage people from lingering and plugging up the thoroughfare. Not as many shops, and the ones there didn’t have the same homespun character as those deeper in the market. A big general store with a totally authentic, not at all cosmetic thatched roof, and a parts and equipment shop for your last-minute yeah, I guess I should probably do something about that engine rattle before I plunge my crew into the unforgiving vacuum of space needs.
The path got steeper up ahead, branching off left and right to all manner of staff and support buildings, each one marked with a sign so strung with vines and blotchy with moss that they only really suggested directions. This way lies something, that way lies something else. Happy hunting.
“Why do they still call them dry docks?” Anke asked as they passed a big archway on the right. Somebody got smart and etched the lettering straight through the metal, DRY DOCK, so even the moss couldn’t hide it completely. “Made sense when the ships were in water, but I mean. All docks are dry docks now. So do they call the docks for the water ships wet docks? Or did we just throw up our hands and give up on distinguishing between a dry dock that’s wet sometimes, and a dry dock that’s really just a dock in its natural state of.…” She trailed off as it became clear Nash wasn’t listening. “What’s wrong?”
Nash kept walking, hand still clasped around Anke’s. “Do me a favor,” she said to Anke, quietly. “You got your GLASS on you? Don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out. Absolutely not freaking.” Ignoring the sweaty palms, because she was pretty sure her earlobes were sweating by then. Too much running, too much uphill, too much heat for a girl who basically lived in supercooled server rooms.
“Good,” Nash said, and somehow it even managed not to sound condescending. “Then hold up your GLASS like you got a message or something, and let me know if you see a redhead following us.”
She could do that. Be cool. Be smooth. She wasn’t sure it was possible to channel someone she’d just met a day ago, but she vibed her best Nash as she angled up her GLASS. “Wow,” she whispered. “That’s, like. Fireball red. Brush-fire red. You think he dyes it?”
“Take it that’s a yes.”
“Yep, he’s on us like stink on, well. Us.” It didn’t make sense, how her mouth could be dry when the air was so wet. “Are we still not freaking out?”
“Still not freaking out,” Nash confirmed, as her free hand dipped to her pack. Anke thought she saw a flash of something vaguely weapon-looking. Shock baton? Spicy. “But it looks like Red’s got a friend.” To Anke’s credit, she eyeballed the next one all by herself. Plainclothes getup and a bomb-ass fishtail braid, leaning all casual against a lamppost. Lousy place to take a breather, when there were benches by the shops just a short walk back, and if she’d stopped to wait for a friend, she probably wouldn’t have done it halfway behind a tree. “Aw, sweetheart. Who taught you how to tail?” Nash muttered.
“She’s getting closer.” Don’t panic. Anke’d been in tighter scrapes than this. “What the frick’re we doing, here?”
“I’m going to politely ask them to fuck off,” Nash replied.
“And if they don’t?” Fingers crossed for a coincidence. Maybe Red just decided to walk the same way at the same time, and maybe Fishtail kept looking at her like that because Anke just had one of those faces.
Yeah, Nash didn’t look like she bought it, either. A little more of the shock baton slid from her bag, saying silently, You kids sure you want to do this? “Then you’re going to run for the ship, and I’m going to pump these assholes full of so much electricity, they shit sparkles.” It shouldn’t have been possible to say such terrible things with such a wonderful smile, but Nash was really out there making it happen.
“There’s two of them,” Anke whispered as Nash steered her down the path.
“I know, it’s bad form, but we don’t have time to wait for them to get more guys.” She flashed a wink and squeezed Anke’s hand. “Wait ’til I have their attention and run like hell. Copy?”
“Copy,” she said with a firm nod.
And then … she didn’t.
She was going to. Seriously, probie ranger with the magic typing fingers wasn’t about to question the tactical genius of a badass medic-mechanic with a shock baton. As Nash called out to the mercs—“Hey, I get this isn’t the usual escort gig, but could you at least put some effort into it? For me?”—and as Red and Fishtail dropped the act and rushed them, Anke was all ready to book it for the Ambit. Even made it as far as the edge of the path, hunching behind a fern-covered rock while Nash friggin’ decimated the mercs. No shooting that close to the port, or they’d risk bringing security down on themselves, which—bad news for all parties.
So, melee only, and Nash was absolutely handing them their asses. A parry here, a smack of the baton there; Red pulled a knife, and Nash did some kind of spectacular spin move that Anke couldn’t really follow, except to say it was the single most graceful thing she’d seen in her whole entire life and she was maybe kind of a little bit in love. Somehow it ended with Red’s wrist trapped under Nash’s arm, and Anke swore she heard the pop as Nash twisted. The knife dropped neatly into Nash’s waiting hand, and a firm swat to the back with her baton dropped him and left him writhing on the mulchy walkway next to his buddy with the braid.
After all that, it kind of seemed like she wouldn’t need to run. Nash had dropped her bag and whipped out some zip cuffs—one day, maybe Anke would work up the nerve to ask why she just casually carried zip cuffs around in her bag—and had started tying them up, presumably to buy her and Anke some time to am-scray. Anke figured she’d just wait until Nash sorted that, and they could stroll back to the ship hand in hand and wait for the guys to catch up.
Then she saw the third merc. Shouldn’t have been there, but as Nash wrestled an uncooperative Fishtail’s hands behind her back, Anke spied him coming up the path behind them. Plainclothes, just like the others, and he didn’t exactly announce himself. Right away, though, Anke could feel something off about him. The normal reaction to walking up on a ranger cuffing a pair of strangers was to turn around and walk the other direction. Maybe gawk a little; people were nosey.
But he moved closer. Quiet as a mouse, he crept up behind Nash, and a flash of something silver in his hand stopped Anke’s breath in her throat. Knife. Say something. If she yelled and Nash didn’t react fast enough, though, she’d get hurt. Throw something. Except she couldn’t throw for shit and was just as likely to hit Nash. Oh, would you just do something?
She didn’t really have a plan as she snuck out from behind the rock, but one came together on its own. Nash’s bag lay where she’d left it, about halfway to the edge of the path. The man walked past it, and a few beats later, Anke made a break for it. Snapped it up, cocked it back, and whipped it as hard into the back of the man’s head as she possibly could.
She wasn’t expecting the hard, metallic clang that echoed across the path. Wasn’t expecting the man to drop like he did, either. “Shit!” she yelped as she stood over him, Nash’s bag still swinging from her arm. “I didn’t—what do you even have in this thing?”
Nash, whose wide eyes bounced from the man, to the knife, to the bag, and finally landed on Anke’s face, cracked a grin. “You’re officially my new favorite,” she said, holding out her hand for the bag. Anke handed it over a bit lamely, still blinking at the third merc.
“Did I kill him?”
“Nah.” He twitched when Nash kicked him, though the blood oozing steadily from the welt on his head still made Anke sort of queasy. “Here.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a metal cannister.
“Looks like an urn.”
“Would you just open the stupid—what is wrong with you people?” A twist of the lid, and she passed it over.
Flowers. There were flowers in the cannister, rooted in a little gel substrate. “Hah! I just coldcocked a man with a bouquet. Ooh, they smell amazing, too. Sorry,” she added, to the unconscious merc.
Nash laughed, brightly but softly, as she slung an arm around Anke’s shoulders and stowed her baton. “My new favorite,” she repeated, and with a squeeze that felt almost, dangerously, like a hug, she pulled Anke along all the way back to the ship.
JAL
Two at the entrance of the alley, three back by the stack with Saint. From his vantage point on the restaurant roof, Jal didn’t see any latecomers headed their way, but he still didn’t love the numbers.
Another grunt rasped through the comms. Sounded like Saint. Sounded like pain. Once upon a time, the combination would’ve twisted his guts up in knots, but Jal focused more on the muffled voices that came after. “Where are they?” he thought they said; hard to tell with it garbled secondhand through the earpiece. Didn’t reckon he’d have even gotten that much, except he had a sneaking suspicion somebody’d turned up his earpiece. Saint’s punched-out “Who’s they?” sounded like it came from right beside him.
“You blowin’ everybody’s ears out, Captain, or am I just special?”
Eoan ignored him. “I expect that’s a cracked rib,” they reported, conversationally. Which, bullshit—nobody conversationally play-by-played a beating. Saint’s next grunt came with a calm “Ah, right in the mouth. It’s a shame, you know. He has such a lovely smile.”
“I know what you’re doing,” Jal said. Seemed subtle wasn’t in their programming.
“And what are you doing?” So pointed, they could’ve drawn blood. “They’re beating my XO bloody within spitting distance, and what? You’re just going to leave him to it?”
“He left me to worse.”
“You’re punishing him, then.”
“Nah,” he said, “they’re punishing him.” He was just sitting on a roof. Waiting. Listening, whether he wanted to or not, as the mercs kept pressing. Where are they? A grunt. I won’t ask you again. A rasp of a laugh.
“Asked a dozen times already,” he heard Saint sigh. “Why stop now?”
Another hit—ribs? Mouth? Slacking on the job, Cap—and Jal’s fingers dug creases into the metal guttering.
“He wouldn’t want me to say this,” Eoan started.
“Then don’t.” As if they’d listen to him.
Predictably, they kept going. “But you shouldn’t blame him for what happened,” they said. “Saint needed this posting. You know his history as well as I do—all the people he’s lost. Comrades in arms. Friends. He needed a crew he’d never have to bury, and who else could’ve given him that?”
A screw snapped off the gutter under Jal’s hand, and he barely caught it before it fell out of reach. He hadn’t realized how hard his grip had gotten. “Stop,” he said.
They didn’t. “No,” they said. “You need to hear this. You need to understand that when he blackballed your transfer request, he didn’t do it to hurt you.” Like that was news to Jal. Fuck, he hoped Saint couldn’t hear them. Couldn’t blame Eoan for appealing to his better angels, but knowing Saint, he’d sooner take the beating than listen to the captain’s guilt trip. “You need to understand,” they pressed, “that Saint was afraid for you. The Ambit isn’t the sort of posting one should take lightly. At the time, I was an untested captain taking critical, high-risk missions with little to no support in a part of the spiral where nobody wanted to go. If you’d followed him, Saint was worried it—”
“Would’ve ended badly?” He couldn’t quite bite back the snort. “All roads lead, I reckon.” His mama used to say some folks were just born with bad luck in their stars. Jal was born with it in his bones.
Eoan didn’t falter. “Would’ve gotten you killed,” they finished, firmly. “So, he chose something different, not just to spare himself another burial, but to spare you. To spare your family. Whether it was his choice to make or not, that’s not for me to say, but however unpleasantly it ended for the pair of you, this isn’t the time to work through your grievances.”
Grievances. A pretty word for a real ugly thing. He’d lived so many years with that tangled ball of hurt, and he still hadn’t managed to pull out all the threads. Fury and confusion, disgust with himself and with the man he’d put his faith in—part of him was afraid if he really started tugging, he’d never get to the end of it.
No, it really wasn’t the time or the place, and it really wasn’t why Jal was on that roof. “Just sit tight,” he told Eoan, drawn closer to the edge of the roof by a sudden bout of swearing down below. “Something’s happening.” One of the lookouts kicked the dumpster, and the other muttered frantically into their own comms. With all the street noise below, it was easier to read his lips than try to suss it out by ear. Something about the port, and the program. No. The programmer. “They made it to the ship? Eoan!” he snapped, when they didn’t answer fast enough. “You have them?”
“Anke and Nash are boarding as we speak,” Eoan replied.
Time to wrap up the show, then. Wasn’t the prettiest way to keep the mercs’ attention, but corralling them into the alley and giving them something—or someone—to focus on? Hell of a lot smarter than trying to run them around the Gulley the whole time.
He let out a breath, prying his fingers from the dented gutters. Somebody else’s fault for building them so damn soft. “Just so we’re clear,” he said as he stood, dusting the grit and leaf litter off his hands. Bending his knees, one at a time. Stretching was highly underrated. “This ain’t ’cause of what you said.” Then, with the two lookouts waiting below, he dropped off the roof’s edge.
He landed clean. A jump from that height made his ankles twang and his gut lurch, but nothing more. He had his wits about him well before the lookouts did. By the time one finished turning to him, he’d slammed the other crown-first into the wall. A meaty-bony thump, and he went down like a sack of rocks while Jal got an arm hooked around his buddy’s throat. Couldn’t let him call out, make a sound, warn his friends, so Jal held fast. Elbow under the merc’s thick-bearded chin, watching his face turn pink, then red, then purple as he clawed at Jal’s arm. We all gotta try. Instinct, nature, whatever. Jal had grown up swinging picks and dead-hanging from magnetic floating mesas, though, so try all he liked, the merc still wound up unconscious and crammed into the dumpster with his tattooed friend. He bent the latch shut and only felt a little bad about it. They started it.
“What’s the plan?” Eoan asked steadily. Must’ve been nice, always keeping their cool like that. Having an on-off switch for all those pesky feelings yanking fools like Jal around by the ribs. “Report, Ranger.”
“I ain’t a ranger,” he ground out. “And you ain’t my captain.” They’d made damn sure of that when they’d shut down his transfer request. Might’ve been Saint doing the leaving, but it was Eoan’s signature under that big, red DENIED—Eoan’s hand on the hammer, driving that one last nail into Jal’s coffin. Guess you buried another friend after all, old man. Funny the way life worked out sometimes. “Listen, you let me do my thing, I’ll have your XO out in two shakes.” Maybe three, he thought as he peeked around the corner to get eyes on the others.
The first merc, the closest one, prowled back and forth across the alley, shaking his hand and muttering curses. Had the build of somebody who’d seen a fight or two in his time, and the silver hair and paunch to suggest his time might’ve passed a while ago. “Call them back out,” he spat, snarling, with a voice like diesel fumes and rusted metal. Still sporting the ol’ high and tight, clothes near enough to pass for a uniform to the undiscerning eye.
Not having a super afternoon, are we? Seemed to be a lot of that going around. Just behind him in the alley, the last two mercs had Saint on his knees, arms drawn up behind him. Nasty way to hold a man; move too much, Saint might dislocate a shoulder. Bad one wouldn’t take much. The right one. Jal hated that he still knew that—that he would’ve known it, even without the brace holding it steady.
So surprise wasn’t gonna work. Older guy might’ve had his back to Jal, but the two holding Saint couldn’t miss him. That was fine. For a man who’d spent the lion’s share of his Guild career in recon and infil, he was awfully bad at tactics. More balls than brains was the consensus. A dive right in kind of guy.
Which was exactly what he did.
He drew his borrowed gun and rounded the corner, covering as much ground as he could shy of a jog. Gun was just a bluff; if shit got nasty, he needed to be in close enough to do something about it. “Don’t,” he said as the graybeard went for his own gun, but the old fucker was fast—faster than those lugs back in the dumpster. He had his short-stock rifle out and even with Jal’s nose by the time Jal cleared the halfway mark. No clip, so something battery powered. Directed energy.
He slowed maybe a handful of strides from the barrel. “You fire that thing, you’ll bring every guard in the port down on this alley,” he said. Even a silent piezo round would set off the sensors dotted round the market. Sooner’s Weald had a pretty strict no-shoot-out policy. High population density, high likelihood of collateral damage.
“Same as you,” said the graybeard without lowering his rifle. After a beat, though, his lips peeled back from his teeth in the smuggest, slimiest smile Jal had ever seen. “Unless there’s something wrong with your gun, boy.”
Over the graybeard’s shoulder, Jal caught Saint’s eyes for a split second. This is what happens when you give a man an empty gun.
The way the mercs had him pinned, Saint couldn’t shrug his shoulders, but his face said it just fine. Ah, well, what can you do?
That absolute bastard. But Jal smiled, too, cheery as a butcher’s dog. “No, sir,” he said.
Then he hurled it straight at the merc’s smug-ass face.
He didn’t wait to see if it hit, charging forward with his head and shoulders down, but the yelp sounded promising. It came just a beat before his shoulders slammed into the graybeard’s middle, throwing them both to the ground and sending that rifle of his skittering across the alleyway. In the middle distance, he heard a commotion—Saint caught his keepers while they were distracted, swept Shifty from the brew cart’s legs and slammed his head into the other merc’s chin. Good for him. For a second there Jal worried a couple of soft-bellied bottom-feeders actually got the better of him.
A sudden stab of too-bright light brought tears to his eyes as he grappled the graybeard. Specs got knocked off, but he managed to twist out of a half-set chokehold and scramble on top of the merc. A blind punch hit meat, though he couldn’t have said where. Could barely force his eyes open through the burn of all those neon lamps, and when he did, everything looked watery and white. Felt like somebody digging their thumbs into his eye sockets.
Cheap-shotting motherfucker. He snarled, throwing another punch, and another when that one seemed to connect. The white became shapes as his eyes tried to adjust—ground and silhouettes and a blur of silvery hair. A knee found his ribs, and hands clawed at his arms, but he kept hitting ’til the blurs turned red, and the hands went slack, and the knee slid flat to the ground beneath him.
He fell back, squinting into blotches of electric blue and searing red-orange in time to watch a vaguely Saint-shaped smudge flip someone over his shoulder and drive his heel into their … face? Temple? Back of their head?
He felt around the damp ground for his specs as a brusque “Ah, shit” peppered the air up ahead of him. “Hang on, kid, I got it.” Saint’s shape jogged closer, until he damn near filled Jal’s whole field of vision. Jal swallowed against the thudding in his throat, the too close, can’t see, get back panic of having his keenest sense taken away from him, however fleetingly.
The familiar weight of his specs pressing into his hands was a relief. Couldn’t get the damn things on fast enough, wrestling the frayed straps into place around the back of his head and wiping the lenses clean with the hem of his shirt.
Ah, and the Saint-shaped blur had a face again. A bloody face, already starting to swell at the corner of his mouth, but it didn’t seem to bother him as he offered Jal a hand. “That strap’s shot,” Saint observed with a frown. “It’s a wonder they stay on at all.”
Replacement’s a bit hard to come by where I’ve been, he thought but didn’t say, but he swore Saint still heard him.
With visible effort, Saint stretched his bruised lips into a smile. “We’ll see if Nash can put something together,” he said, and Jal thought that’d be the end of it. Saint didn’t look away, though.
Well, if he wouldn’t, Jal would. He slunk off, surveying the damage Saint had dealt to the two mercs as he grabbed their bags. Seemed like enough time for Saint to get back to business, but when Jal turned back around, Saint hadn’t stopped watching him. “What?”
“You came back.” Somehow, he didn’t sound all that surprised. “Took your sweet time, but you didn’t bail when you had the chance. So, uh. Thanks, kid.” And Jal wondered if Saint felt as strange saying it as Jal did hearing it.
Strange, but … pleased.
Not that he’d tell Saint that. He went for the gun, grumbling sourly the whole way. “They won’t know it’s empty. The hell they won’t.”
Saint snorted. Seemed a thank you and a sorry in one sitting was too much to ask. “Hey, don’t look at me. Think that’s the best your aim’s ever been with a gun.”
Jal stooped to pick it up where it’d fallen and tucked it back in his belt. “I was aiming for the other guy.” He wasn’t saying it to be funny. Contrary, maybe, but for some damn reason Saint started laughing. Quiet at first, then louder, until he doubled over with it, hand on Jal’s shoulder to steady himself.
Damn him and his stupid, bloody, happy grin, because Jal started laughing, too. Bubbled up from his chest so quick he couldn’t stop it, and he didn’t care to try. It’d been … fuck, it’d been so long since he’d just stood and laughed with a friend, and it felt good. Good as running through the market with the wind at his back. Good as hearing Bitsie’s laugh for the first time in years, even if it was just a video. It felt as good as all the other bits and pieces he’d found of himself since he’d left that living hell behind him in the frontier, and maybe that was why it felt like such a loss when Saint finally straightened up and cleared his throat.
“Better get back,” he said, but he still had those creases at the corners of his eyes. A lingering smile, where he usually carried so much strain. “Still got a job to do.”
That we do, old man. He just wished they were after the same thing.