JAL
Jal steadied the cables as the others slid down.
“Please tell me you could see the bottom before you jumped,” Nash griped as her feet touched down. She whistled for Saint when she was clear.
“I could see the bottom before I jumped,” Jal replied, dutifully trying not to grin. It didn’t seem to work, if Nash’s narrowed eyes were any indication, but he deserved points for the effort. “Told you, that was nothing.”
“That was two stories at a straight drop. I weep for your knees.”
He caught the cables again as Saint’s weight jostled them from above, a handful of nice, sotto swears rolling down the shaft. Saint liked heights about as much as Jal liked enclosed spaces, but like gunshot wounds, busted shoulders, and the bounds of his own questionable mortality, Saint didn’t let it stop him.
“It’s the ankles that’ll get you,” Jal said. “Shattered my right one hopping off a mesa, once.”
“Forget to look before you leapt? Shocker.”
“It was a game,” he said. “Me and my friends, when we were little—workin’ little, not schoolin’ little,” he clarified, though that line got awful blurry back on Brigham Four. “We used to take turns droppin’ geodes off the mesas. Whoever dropped theirs from highest without breaking it took home the pot for the day. Folks got real artsy with it. Wrapped them up in coats, stuffed them in their packs. One kid, he even built this, uh”—he flapped his hands, searching for the right word—“parachute out of his lunch bag. Didn’t work a whit, of course, but it was fun to watch.” He spiraled one hand toward the other and mimed an impact.
“Sounds like you needed a hobby,” Nash said.
“Needed caps more.” He kept it light, swallowing the old ache with practice. Couldn’t very well be a funny story if he started talkin’ about his sick ma and shit. “Pot got pretty big one day, so I thought I’d be clever. We’re made to handle a fall, you know.”
“You didn’t.”
“He did,” Saint said from above.
Right. He’d heard this one. It caught Jal a bit wrong-footed, some half-formed memory of a cold roof and a quiet conversation, but he shook it off. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Held it tight in both hands and walked right off the edge of the mesa. Landed bad; ankle gave me fits forever after. But I won the pot.” The important takeaway. “Always been more scared of losin’ than fallin’, I guess.” Though he supposed he’d done his share of both.
A beat later, Saint’s boots hit the ground. “And the old man makes three.” Jal steadied him without thinking as Saint rolled his bad shoulder—he tried to make it seem more like habit than hurt, but it was a hard sell to anybody who’d seen the scarring—and got a sour-lemons look for his trouble. He just grinned brighter, until he earned a twitch at the corner of Saint’s mouth. Saint was never as far from a smile as folks liked to think.
“As above, so below,” murmured Nash, scanning the room beyond the elevator shaft. He and Saint followed close behind, on the unspoken agreement that it’d be better not to linger under a couple thousand kilos of elevator car hanging by a rusted thread.
It was a mirror image of upstairs, less the whirlwind of broken furniture and the dents in the elevator doors. Like they’d stepped into a reflection, inverted but almost identical, down to the snack machines with mildewed bars and bottles whose labels had been lost to time and some enthusiastic fungus. Dust and damp coated everything in a thin glaze of grime, turning the poured composite floors slick under Jal’s boots as he picked his way across the small lobby. It had the look of a place that smelled sour—ripe with the stink of fermentation, things broken down and belched out and baked in the stifling heat of the underground, sinking into his clothes and settling on his skin like a film.
Bad things had happened down there, too. As above, so below.
“Footprints.” Saint didn’t get distracted with things like molded snacks and cold, creeping dread. Always moving forward, like a … shit, what were they called? Big fish, big teeth. He was one of those, the apex badass in whatever pond he decided to dive into. “Clean enough to be recent,” Saint said as he knelt to look closer. Recent enough that he drew his gun when he stood, aiming it down the open doorway across from the elevators. “Captain?”
“Still clear,” they replied down the line. “No warm bodies.”
Maybe Jal was just being morbid, but that kind of implied there were some cold ones. It turned his stomach, made his palms clammy in his gloves. Death wasn’t new, but this was different; this was a long walk through a mass grave. Nash and Anke had it right: it wasn’t like the depot. These people hadn’t just lain down and died. They’d died ugly, fighting and afraid, and they’d left ugly corpses.
Jal couldn’t help thinking on the kind of corpse he might’ve left, if those scavs hadn’t found him.
“Kid,” Saint said, clipped and stony, but worry pinched the corners of his eyes. Like he could hear all those piling-on thoughts in Jal’s head. See them, maybe. Jal never had much of a poker face, and Saint had never had much trouble calling his bluffs. It was an act of mercy that he didn’t ask, didn’t press, didn’t prod. He waited at the mouth of the tunnel, under the double-wide and double-enforced archway, with an air of expectation. “We’re moving.”
Just find the next foothold. Jal dredged up a smile and jogged to catch up, and Saint clapped him once between the shoulder blades as he passed and still, graciously, didn’t ask.
For a while, the tunnel was just a tunnel. Shored-up stone and dust in all the crevices, grout running down the drippy, moldy walls like pus from a festered wound. It was drier down there than it had been aboveground, but only so far as a hard rain was drier than a swim. Pillars stabbed through the cracked floors, and a weak breeze sighed through the pipes along the ceiling. Sounded listless, mournful, and it didn’t do anything to smooth Jal’s hackles.
They rounded a corner, though, and everything changed.
“Damn.” Because Jal’s vocabulary wasn’t up to trying to describe the mental fuckery of seeing what looked like a cozy city street stretching out underground. Not a bunch of subbasements strung together, trying to look like something other than what they were; an actual, bona fide street, with lampposts and storefronts with cracked-glass windows and signs that still said things like CAVERY’S BOOTS AND BELTS and HIGH STREET MARKET. Even he didn’t miss the irony of a name High Street for someplace subterranean. He guessed to live in a place that glum, folks had to have a sense of humor.
Eoan made a small, eager sound halfway to a giggle. “Quite something, isn’t it? The schematics don’t do it justice.”
No, they hadn’t. No place in a drawn-to-scale blueprint for the slick cobblestones under his boots, buckling toward the middle of the street, or for the dusty old patio furniture sitting outside BAFFLER’S CANTEEN. It was disorienting; his brain kept trying to right the picture, flip it all aboveground and pretend away the ceiling over his head. Panels of colored beehive glass let in a little light from above, enough to wash liquid shades of blues and greens and purples up and down the stone facings. Underwater. That was how it felt, like the whole street had sunk straight to the bottom of a lake and brought them along for the ride. “They built it like this?”
“Someone wasn’t using his listening ears in the brief.” Nash snorted, clearing a spot of mildew off the canteen window and peering inside. Whatever she saw made her recoil. Jal didn’t need more information than that. “This used to be aboveground.”
“Guessin’ they didn’t just up and decide they’d like the view better down here.”
“Bunch of genius developers,” Saint said from a few steps down the street. “Picked a nice flat spot with a nice pretty view. Didn’t occur to them ’til the wet season that ninety percent of it was below the floodplain.”
“Hell of an oversight,” Jal said.
Saint gave a distracted grunt that Jal took as agreement. He made his way methodically from door to door, shining his tac light inside long enough for a cursory sweep. The light was the same as the headlamps, red and soft even when Jal looked straight at it, though he almost wished it wasn’t. Would’ve made it harder to see through the glass, at all the too-still shapes inside the too-still shops, huddled together like they’d known what was coming and couldn’t bear to face it alone.
“Not that it matters,” Nash added. She bumped him as she passed, with a glint in her eyes that said, Shake it off. “Couple of months of mudslides and washouts, and they finally said to hell with it and walled it all in. Laid down some transport roads up top, weatherproofed the footpath from the tenements, and carried right on building. The Trust has always been pretty good at rolling with the punches.”
“Not too bad at doling them out, either.” Case in point. There must’ve been hundreds of people on Noether when the Trust flipped the switch. Hundreds of people left to rot on a poisoned planet—a whole city of cadavers, tucked away underground.
Growing up on a cold, lightless rock, he used to think he knew what darkness was. He’d had no idea.
“I’ve reached the operations building.” They’d been waiting for that—the all clear from Eoan, and not a moment too soon. Only thing worse than running through a graveyard was slow-walking through one. “Doors are stuck, but I don’t imagine they’ll give you too much trouble.”
“Finally,” Nash said, and like on Sooner’s, she was the first to break into a run. Not quite full tilt, but something close to it. Not a thought spared for the uneven cobble or the slick ground, like she’d never slipped a day in her life and wasn’t about to start now.
The street got narrower as they ran, storefronts giving way to stretches of tunnels with close-curved ceilings and unmarked doorways. Sometimes they forked, but Nash always seemed to know exactly which door to take. Left, left, middle, disappearing around a corner in a flash of silver-streaked hair and reappearing when they followed her around the bend. On and on they went, each new length of tunnel looking more and more similar to the last.
“Ah, I see you,” Eoan chirped. “This way, this way.” Like a goose hurrying along its goslings, and if Jal squinted down toward the end of the tunnel, past where it split off to rows and rows of tenement houses, he could make out the shape of their drone.
It floated into another lobby, inverted left to right from the one beneath the shopping center, but this one was—
“Christ, who turned loose the bulls?” Saint stepped over the ruins of a bench, boots crunching on bits of broken glass and twisted shards of metal. The elevator lobby and everything in it had been ripped apart, broken open. Notice boards had been torn from the walls, lights shattered, those same two vending machines from the other two lobbies turned on their sides, spilling snacks and drinks like guts across the floor. Not much left of them now but faded wrappers and moldered smears on the floor. “They wanted up,” he said, tac light trailing over the ruined elevator doors.
It was worse than they’d seen back in the shopping center. Clusters of small dents that probably would’ve matched the edges of the pipes and extinguishers and bench rails scattered at the base of the doors. Shoulder-height depressions, shallow and deep. They threw themselves against the doors. Jal’s throat went tacky; his mouth dried and soured. Dark stains smudged over the dented, polished chrome, almost inky in the tinted light. Scratches and scrapes in the brushed texture of the metal. Streaks in threes and fours, like fingers tearing at the seams of the doors. They’d tried ’til they bled, and it still hadn’t been enough.
His pulse roared in his ears; his hands twitched, curled, like he was the one tearing at the doors. He had been once. Halfway across the spiral, in a different set of ruins. No virus, no code, just a bunch of asshole scavs and the creeping realization that he was never getting out.
“There should be bodies here,” Nash said. Someone made a quizzical sound over the comms, but Jal couldn’t figure out who. “Blood in the corners. Blood on the walls. Adipocere deposits on the ground.”
“What the hell’s adipo—?” Jal gave up trying to pronounce it, turning to watch her prowl around the room.
She paused near the leftmost elevator door, feet at the edge of a shiny, greasy patch on the floor. “Corpse wax.”
He swallowed, tasting stomach acid and the breakfast he truly regretted eating. “Sorry I asked.”
Nash shrugged. “Human bodies are disgusting.” But she didn’t look especially disgusted. Intrigued, more like. “There would’ve been dozens of them, to leave a mess like this. Somebody must’ve moved them. Unless they got up and walked themselves out,” she added, arching a teasing eyebrow over her shoulder at Jal.
“Oh, God. They can’t actually—they can’t do that, though, right?” Anke squeaked.
At least when it came to Anke, Nash was kind enough to look guilty. “No,” she said. “Sorry, it was a bad joke.”
“An apology.” Saint whistled, crouching by what looked to be another set of footprints by the centermost lift. “Breathing rarified air out there, Anke. I wasn’t even sure she knew how.”
Nash muttered something too low to hear, but it probably didn’t bear repeating. “Don’t make it something more than it is,” she told them. “They’re just bodies, and this is just a room, and the Deadworld Code is just a long-ass string of numbers and letters. If the bodies are gone, it’s because somebody wanted them gone.”
“But not the ones in the shops?” Eoan said.
Jal’s fingers itched for Saint’s beat-up flask. Still carrying it around, old man? Couldn’t exactly take a swig with the rebreathers in the way, but that didn’t used to matter. That flask had been as much a part of Saint’s uniform as his gun belt, and Jal had only lately started to understand why. He sighed. “Only the ones that were in the way,” he said. “Must’ve been people here after the rain hit. Mercs or agitators—no-fly over the operations building, so they would’ve made this trip, too.”
“Regularly,” Saint agreed. “Once or twice, you wouldn’t go to the trouble; you’d just leave them and keep walking.” Like they’d done with the bodies in the security office. The storefronts. The shipping depot. Fuck, what was wrong with them? They’d just left them there. They’d left them all there, and Jal hadn’t even stopped to think—
Nash hummed. “But they made it a habit,” she said. Already on the same page as Saint, easy as breathing. One thought, two heads. “Think they’re still here?”
“Seems likely,” Saint said. “Cap?”
“I can’t get a scan beyond this point,” they replied. “Get the drone through the door, and I could try to run it ahead and see what’s up there, but I’m getting more signal interference—definitely from the building, possibly something atmospheric. I don’t expect I would make it very far out of the lift. You might be on your own from here, I’m afraid, but you have my utmost confidence.”
“Really ought to know better by now, Cap,” Nash said, bending to pick a length of pipe up off the floor. One end in the seam of the doors—it fit so neatly between two gouges that it must’ve been done before—and with a quick shove, she had the doors open before Jal could even start to offer to help. “Low-tech, but it gets the job done.” She wedged the pipe between the doors to hold them open and ducked inside. “Don’t knock it loose when you come through,” she called back. “I’m a damn good doctor, but spontaneous hemicorporectomy is very hard to come back from.”
He and Saint traded looks and, carefully, followed her through.
The drone floated unhappily outside the doors as Nash and Saint started making their way up the cable. “I know it goes against every instinct you have,” Eoan began, “but please be careful.” It was strange to hear the layers in the words. Levity stretched over genuine concern. Anyone who said AI weren’t human had clearly never heard one talk like that, worry like that, care like that.
“Aye aye, Cap,” Jal said with a salute, then he backed up enough for a running start and bounded up the wall of the shaft. A push off the wall, and he caught the hanging cable about sixty decs up—cut the climb clear in half. For a second, he just let himself hang. Let his muscles burn and the empty air yawn out underneath him. Let himself breathe in the dark, without imagining all those melting, black-lidded eyes watching him.
“Problem?” Saint called from the bottom of the shaft. Nash had already started up the cable.
He mustered a smile and wondered if they could see it in their fancy little lights. “Just waiting for y’all to catch up.” Then he hand-over-handed the rest of the way up the cable, jumped the gap through an open doorway, and landed in a brand-new elevator lobby. “Goddamn, they really picked a theme and stuck to it, didn’t they?” More benches. More machines. More bulletin boards with their thick glass screens, diodes in the backing to scroll through whatever messages were worth broadcasting.
More bodies.
“Heads up,” he said, grimacing. “We’ve got another…” But he trailed off, footfalls echoing off the high ceilings as he moved closer to the shape on the floor. Just the one, black clothes against stark white tiles. Everything on Noether was so goddamn white, and so goddamn dirty, and so goddamn dead. Something dark and wet seeped across the tiles, spreading in the cracks away from the body.
It came away tacky on the tips of his gloves. Shiny and thick, rolling down the rubberized grips on his fingers, onto his palm. Not right, he thought, stumbling to his feet and away from the body. “That’s not right.” He only half-heard the others climbing over the edge, only half-noticed their boots hitting the tile. “There shouldn’t be any—”
“Jal?” Saint’s shadow rose across the tile, and Jal turned to face him, holding up his hand to the shine of their lights. “Is that blood?” Jal didn’t get to answer; Saint charged forward, snatching Jal’s hand and turning it over between his own. “Are you hurt? What did you—”
“Ain’t mine.” Too quiet; Saint must not have heard him, still pushing up his sleeve and tugging at his glove, still furiously checking him over. “Saint! It ain’t mine, all right? It’s his.” He slipped his hand free of Saint’s to point over his shoulder at the body on the ground, lying in a pool of its own blood. “It shouldn’t look like that, should it? It looks…”
Anke let out a shaky breath in their ears. “Fresh.” He swore he could hear the nausea knotting up her throat, and the exact shape of her hand pressed over her mouth.
Nash had a real different reaction. She crossed the room in a flurry of not fucking around and flattened the back of her hand against the man’s brow. “Dead,” she said. “In case anyone wondered.”
“Never seen anybody take a pulse like that,” Jal said.
“Augments pick up the pulse,” she answered, with a shake of her hair. “When there’s one to pick up, anyway. What I need’s a temp. Saint, this guy’s still warm. And”—she picked up his arm and dropped it—“floppy. I’d say we’re looking at TOD inside six hours.” With a disdainful grimace, she rolled the body over. “Ah, and who had gutshot on their dead planet bingo card? Poor bastard—bad way to go. Takes time.”
“Time enough to crawl out here,” Saint observed, sliding past her with his light aimed at the floor. Tracks. Thick smears of blood leading down the hall, disappearing around the corner.
Jal had thought dragged, at first, but no. No, he must’ve crawled. Blood coated his elbows and his front, where he’d pulled himself forward. “Captain was right,” he said. “The signal’s for shit in here. Might’ve been going for help.”
“I don’t think he made it,” said Nash, flatly. “Wait. Saint, damn it, where are you going? T-form servers are the other way.”
Which Saint definitely knew; he just didn’t seem to care. “Somebody was here,” he said, stalking down the hall with his gun sighted at the corner. Ready to ruin the day of anything stupid enough to surprise him. “Somebody with a gun and no problem using it on our mercenary friend back there.”
Nash made a noncommittal sound. “Enemy of my enemy?”
“Unless they want what we want and ain’t good at sharing,” Jal said. “Anke? Don’t suppose they’re friends of yours.”
“What?” Shit, Anke had some pipes on her. Loud and sharp and a little bit shrill, even with the ship’s comms crackling. She needed to lay off the caffeine before she gave herself a stroke. “No, I—friends? I don’t exactly run in the kinds of circles that off mercs for funsies. Oh, God, why is that a sentence that even makes sense to say?”
Not Guild, then. “Mentioned some other coders after the depot, is all,” he said. Then, to Nash, “See, I do pay attention.”
“Gold star, miner boy.” She groaned. “Saint, seriously, leave it alone.”
“It could be more of those strikers from the depot—Drestyn’s people. You don’t want to know what happened?”
“I want to get off this planet,” she hissed. “Stubborn jackass.” Damned if Jal didn’t agree with her, just this once. In his experience, running toward people with guns was a good way to a bad end.
Once Saint got it in his head to do something, though, it was good as done. “It’ll just take a minute,” Saint said, and oh, Jal could picture the glint in his eyes. Not glee, but maybe its sharp-edged older brother—the satisfaction of knowing exactly what needed to be done and exactly how he was gonna go about doing it. Most men went their whole lives without knowing that kind of certainty, and that was something worth admiring.
Even if he really was a stubborn jackass.
All right, old man. Not like Jal could let him go it alone, so with a sigh and a what can you do shrug to Nash, he took off after him. Closed the gap in a handful of strides and caught him right as he cleared the corner, but when he tried to slow down, his boots slipped. Water, he thought. More fucking water.
Then he looked down. Not water—something darker, like the trail winding its way from the elevator lobby. Blood. It spattered the walls, dripping sluggishly down into the puddle at his feet. “Is that—” he started, raising his fingers to a small hole in the wall.
“Bullet,” Saint confirmed without stopping. He’d marked it, considered it, and filed it away as unimportant, all in the handful of seconds it took Jal to find his footing again. Pro didn’t even begin to cover it, and he only had eyes for the end of that blood trail. It disappeared under a door halfway up the hall, like a snake slithering back into its pit.
“Because that’s not foreboding at all.” He’d fallen behind, though, so with a hard shake of his head—bad time to get squeamish—he caught back up with Saint and Nash. Just blood. Just bodies. Don’t make it something more than it is. Nash gave a hell of a pep talk.
He’d fallen in line at Saint’s shoulder as Saint threw open the door. Gun up, finger on the trigger, but Saint shouldn’t have bothered; nothing waiting for them except more of the goddamn same. Just blood. Just bodies. A baker’s dozen, dragged into a neat line in the middle of what might’ve once been somebody’s office.
“Well,” said Nash brusquely, “at least we know they called in reinforcements.” Definitely more of a welcome wagon than they’d had to contend with on the Weald. “For all the good it did them.”
“I don’t understand.” Quiet, this time; Anke had range. “Why are they dead?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the bullets.”
“Nash,” Eoan warned.
Nash looked sheepish. “Sorry. Reflex.” She knelt by the nearest corpse, checking its pockets and coming up empty. “No ID, extra clips for his piece. If it walks like a merc, talks like a merc—okay, not much walking or talking going on here, but you know what I mean.” She shook her head, straightening. “So somebody whacked the whackers. Anybody else not breathing a deep sigh of relief?”
“They didn’t kill them here.” Saint trailed his gloves along the walls. No blood spatters, no bullet holes, no spent shells. Nothing to suggest a fight except the casualties. “Must’ve dragged them in here, tried to hide them. Probably didn’t realize that guy in the lobby was still alive when they left.”
Jal didn’t like the look on Saint’s face all of a sudden. No glint, no smile, just that grim-flat set of his mouth and a furrow between his brows. “Hide them from what?” he asked, and Saint’s brows knotted deeper, jaw muscles twitching. Ah, fuck. “From us. You think someone knew we were coming.” With enough firepower to wipe out a full crew and enough time to clean house before their trio strolled in.
Saint did something with his shoulders too stiff to be a shrug. “Could just be another group of mercs trying to horn in on the reward, but.” He let it hang, but the point damn near made itself. Could be more mercs, could be more picketers, could be more rangers gone rogue. They didn’t know, and that was the problem.
“It doesn’t rain, but it pours,” Eoan sighed, voice fizzling over the feed. It had gotten worse, the farther they moved from the elevator. A little extra recon with the drone was definitely a nonstarter. “The job doesn’t change. Get to the servers, test Anke’s code, and get back to the ship in one piece. Not in order of importance,” they added sternly. “If someone gets in the way, step over them. To hell with what flag they’re flying under.”
Eoan gave a pretty good pep talk themself.
“In case you were wondering,” said Nash, “nobody here’s gonna top that.” And when she turned on her heel and started back along the blood trail, he and Saint followed without a word.
They left them there, those poor dead bastards. Like the statues in the depot and the corpses in the city below, thirteen more casualties in an undeclared war. They left them there to rot behind a slowly closing door, and they didn’t look back.
The whole planet was a mausoleum, anyway. Maybe the dead were exactly where they belonged.