ANKE
For a dead man’s clothes, they fit surprisingly well.
“You guys really thought of everything, huh?” Anke aimed for complimentary, but it came out vaguely nauseous. For her part, she tried not to think. Not about the blood spotting the starched gray collar of her shirt, not about the sans-clothes corpses lying somewhere back on Noether. Shirt, belt, trousers—she wasn’t even sure they all came from the same person. Something else not to think about.
Of course, because human brains sucked, it didn’t work like that. She’d looked it up once: ironic process theory. Try not to picture a big white bear, and suddenly you couldn’t imagine anything else, and she had so many white bears prowling around her head as they neared the station that she could’ve opened a zoo. A monochromatic, anxiety-and guilt-steeped zoo for the self-flagellating.
There weren’t any good distractions, either. Give her a problem to solve, work to do, and maybe she could wrestle her brain back in line, but no. They’d preloaded the Deadworld Code on a jump drive, the tablet she’d borrowed was up to spec—even if it didn’t sing under her fingers like her old one—and after all the mad programming she’d done on the patch, spoofing a landing pass to get them past the Lewaro blockade was like finger painting. Basic. Took four minutes and half her concentration, and then she went back to fidgeting in the bridge like a sugar-high marmot.
Drestyn glanced back from the controls at the front of the bridge. Hard to find privacy on a ship the size of a cracker box, but he’d sportingly kept his back to her while she’d changed, and if he’d noticed her twitching while he steered them through the Lewaro air lock, he hadn’t brought it up.
“You can’t think of everything, Miss Ahlstrom,” he said instead, and by then she’d lost her train of thought so completely that it took her a minute to find it again. They really thought of everything. The uniforms. Right, okay, she was back. “Best you can do is prepare for what you can, and adapt to what you can’t.” She suddenly wished he wasn’t looking at her. He had the unique ability to force whole sentences into the curve of an eyebrow, and as someone who couldn’t force sentences into actual friggin’ sentences, she was horribly jealous.
“Why do I get the feeling we’re not talking about the uniforms anymore?” she asked.
That damn eyebrow. Somehow the scar slashing through it just made it that much more pointed. “Is there something else we need to be talking about?”
He’s dead. The thought sprang forward with such force that she barely managed to cage it behind her teeth. He’s dead, and you killed him, and I helped. Jal was a goodish person trying to do a good thing, and she and Drestyn were goodish people trying to do a good thing. She wasn’t sure how both could be true, though, when Jal was dead because of them. Goodish people didn’t kill goodish people.
Did they?
She shook her head. Nice of Drestyn to offer an ear and all, but she felt bad enough trying not to think about the things she didn’t want to think about. All the little moments where things had gone wrong—Nash’s copy of the patch going up in smoke. Saint going back to the ship ahead of schedule. Jal following them onto the rooftop. So many white bears, and they all had such sharp teeth. If she actually started talking about them, she was afraid she wouldn’t know how to stop, and there just wasn’t time for a full-on breakdown.
We can pencil something in if we don’t die. Which, hey, good to set goals. “Adapt to what you can’t,” she repeated. A five-word lifeline; a way forward. It wasn’t an answer to Drestyn’s question, but in a way, it worked. “I can do that.”
She couldn’t undo anything, but at least if they finished what they’d started, it could mean something. It had to mean something.
With a nod and maybe even a smidge of a smile, Drestyn turned back to the controls. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “Because we’re here.”
“What?” Wow, that was loud. Cool it, Ahlstrom. This is the easy part. Only, like, a fifty percent chance of death or dismemberment. Practically a lazy Tuesday. The Admin Building, easily the tallest point in the whole of Lewaro City, towered above the gentle waves of silica and steel around it. Very few buildings had their own landing pads; Admin’s jutted out of the sides of the tower like mushroom conks from the trunk of a massive glass tree.
“Which one?” Drestyn cut back on the rockhopper’s engines.
“Uh, the big one? Kind of hard to miss.”
He glanced back at her. “I meant which landing pad.” Then, because he and his stupid loquacious eyebrows couldn’t cut her any slack, he had to go and ask, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Nope.” Honesty was the foundation of all strong relationships. “Definitely not. But I’ve got this.” She totally had this. Leaning over the back of his seat, she pointed to one of the higher pads. “You wanted floor twenty-eight? So put us down there, pad eight. Try to look mercenary. It’d be a pretty bad look if we got shot down before we even landed. Not that we’d really have to worry about it, you know, because we’d be—”
“Extremely dead,” Drestyn finished, amused. Because apparently he was the level of badass that looked death in the face and laughed.
Anke laughed, but it had nothing to do with badassery. She had a nervous giggle. “Yeah, that,” she said, watching as Drestyn eased them down. No idea how he did it; she couldn’t stand people watching her work. But there they went, smooth as silk. Not even a bump when they touched down on the landing pad. She only hoped the rest of the job could go as smoothly.
The engines kept running as Drestyn swept out of his seat. Fluid and graceful, but with a sense of the unstoppable in his steps. Like a river ready to flow over or around or through anything in its path. “Coming, Miss Ahlstrom?” he called from the door, hand outstretched and mouth upturned in a quiet, untroubled smile. And she took it. Took his hand like she’d taken his word when they’d first set out on this mad mission, and she couldn’t say who followed whom on the way to the cargo hatch, but she knew they were moving together toward something.
Drestyn’s men—Rigby, the stocky one with the missing ring finger, lost his farm to foreclosure on a defunct agrarian colony; and Pabel, the platinum-haired giant whose picture was in the dictionary under tough guy, had spent twenty years running the shipping routes with nothing to show for it but a bad hip and a bulldog bobblehead—waited at the hatch in matching uniforms, guns at the ready.
“Already got company on the pad,” Rigby reported, gesturing out the opening hatch where a few security officers filtered out onto the pad. “Three there, but there’ll be plenty more inside if our landing permit didn’t pass the sniff test.” He looked over at Anke with an expression that could politely be called doubtful. “Hope you’re as good with that GLASS as Dres here says, girl, or that’ll be our gooses plucked, cooked, and served for supper.”
Kudos for vivid imagery, but girl? Really? “I told you to call me Anke.”
“I’ll call you the fucking queen if this goes off,” he said gruffly.
“Then in that case, I prefer Your Majesty.”
Rigby rolled his eyes, but as he stepped out onto the ramp, one corner of his mouth curled reluctantly upward. She’d call that a win. With any luck, it wouldn’t be horribly short-lived.
“Name and purpose,” called one of the security officers in a flat, businesslike voice. Each wore cookie-cutter expressions and identical uniforms, and Anke knew it was company policy or whatever, but it just looked like they’d called in sick the day personalities got handed out. No hair color visible under their royal blue caps, with brims so low they might as well have been wearing visors, and standard-issue everything so they could’ve shuffled around like a game of three-card monte and she’d have never known the difference.
“We should’ve gotten those uniforms,” she whispered, nodding her head at them. Talk about blending in. They could march right up to the top-floor control room and nobody’d even slow them down.
Drestyn glanced over. “Good idea. Happen to know where we can find some lying around?” He shook his head minutely. “These uniforms are fine. The Trust has a standing arrangement with this merc syndicate. You don’t piss off the people that bury your bodies for you.”
“So they’ll let us in?” She’d tried to get Drestyn to spill the beans on his plan earlier, but the man was tight-lipped as a smart fish; he hadn’t taken the bait.
Seemed he was finally ready to loosen up a bit. “Well,” he said. “They won’t shoot a merc on sight. A picketer, on the other hand.” He shrugged and, as the security officers called out again, he started down the ramp of the rockhopper, unruffled by the wind howling across the landing pad. Naturally, that same wind plastered half her hair to her face the second she stepped clear of the ship. Insult, meet injury.
“We’re here for Otho Yarden,” Drestyn called across the landing pad to the security officers.
Otho Yarden and his station-wide administrator-level access terminal, Anke amended silently. No air-gapped T-form systems on Lewaro, no sir. Just a massive spider’s web of interconnected networks with a creepy, bug-eyed crawler in the middle, plucking all the strings.
It felt like an eternity, and Anke might’ve sweated through the first layer of her uniform before the middle officer said, “We’ll need to see some identification.”
“Wow,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “People actually say that.” She’d only heard it in movies, usually right before the guards called shenanigans. Which. Gulp.
Drestyn must not have watched the same movies, because he just cleared his throat and said, “Otho Yarden is expecting us.”
Wrong answer. The middle officer drew her gun—Slava Pulser, small-caliber piezoelectric charges, and Anke wasn’t sure if she felt better or worse for knowing it. Firearm instruction was a mandatory prereq for fieldwork, and she had a hard time not retaining information. The good news was, it meant she knew it had a nonlethal setting. The bad news was, she couldn’t tell which setting it was on.
“Identification!” the officer shouted. Maybe she’d gotten some personality after all: mostly angry. She had a voice like refined cobalt, hard and lustrous, and she didn’t sound like she was used to having to repeat herself.
Anke was a little thrown when Drestyn raised his hands. A perfectly reasonable reaction to having a gun pointed at you by a very angry security officer, sure, but surrender somehow didn’t mesh with her image of him.
“On a scale of one to royally, how screwed are we?” she hissed between her teeth.
“Relax” was Drestyn’s totally unhelpful answer.
She valiantly wrestled back the urge to throw something at him. Instead, she hissed, “You can’t tell someone like me to relax. I’m seventy-five kilos of anxiety and worst-case scenarios. Not. Happening.” Not nearly as satisfying as hitting him, but probably less likely to get them shot. Trust security officers weren’t known for their restrained trigger fingers.
He turned back to her, hands still raised. “You came to me for a reason,” he said mildly. It was true. Things hadn’t gone to plan at the depot—his people were supposed to pluck her from the hands of Riesen, not wind up dead and buried beneath half an exploded hangar—but that didn’t change the fact that this was his world. He was one of the best at what he did, and she needed him. “You got us to the front door; I’ll get us through it. Just trust me.”
Kind of a tough sell, since he’d shot a friend of hers, but he’d been honest about what he was doing from the jump. She couldn’t say the same. “Okay,” she said. “But if we get blasted into oblivion, I’m absolutely holding it against you.”
“Fair enough.” A wink—he winked—and forward he went, palms out and shoulders soft, like the fluffiest, most harmless merc to ever walk the earth. “Just tell Yarden we’re here. He should be able to clear things up.”
“Take off the hat,” said the man on the right. Anke couldn’t really tell anything else about him. Average height, average build. Did they even make the uniforms in plus sizes? Bastards. And out came his gun. “Show your face.”
Right. Like that wouldn’t set off a thousand alerts on the facial recs. “I don’t think they’re buying the—”
Then, Drestyn took off his hat.
Oh, they were so boned. The security officers’ gunsights all snapped to Drestyn’s chest like some kind of video game aim assist, and Anke’s saving grace was that she was too flabbergasted to panic. She looked between Rigby and Pabel, standing on either side of the bottom of the rockhopper ramp, but they both had their hands up like Drestyn.
If this is the plan, it’s a stupid one, she thought, begrudgingly raising her hands. She didn’t exactly scream dangerous, but it probably didn’t pay to be the only one in the group not raising her hands. Stupid, stupid plan.
The officers crossed the pad in a flurry of wind-muffled boot steps and gun muzzles, two pushing ahead to take Pabel’s and Rigby’s guns from their belts while the woman with the cobalt voice held back with Drestyn in her sights.
“Go ahead,” Anke muttered at Drestyn’s back. “Tell me to relax again. I literally dare—”
She couldn’t follow the precise sequence of events, but in the half second between one word and the next, Cobalt Lady had chin-kicked one of the other officers—and hello, flexibility—and turned her own gun on the other. Somewhere in there, Drestyn drew his gun, too. No laser sights, but Anke could follow the aim to the neighborhood of Mister Chin-Kicked’s forehead.
“—you,” she finished, only because she couldn’t bear to leave it open-ended. Well, then. At least she knew why he’d kept the plan hush-hush. Anke wouldn’t have trusted herself with deep cover double cross, either. At least her abject terror was convincing, that way. You’re welcome.
Drestyn ignored her, telling the two remaining officers, “Guns on the ground.” Cool as coolant—and wow, there had to be a better simile than that—like he didn’t even see the guns aimed his way. “Your guns or your lives, gentlemen. I’m taking one. Your choice which you keep.”
Do what he says, she thought, fervently. It’s not worth dying over. But the Trust, with all that power and all that impunity, made it far too easy to buy in. To mistake a paycheck for a purpose.
Even Anke’s untrained eyes saw their fingers tensing on the triggers, but they weren’t quick enough. Two shots so in sync they sounded like one, and the officers dropped at the points of Drestyn’s and Cobalt’s guns.
Anke forced herself to watch. This was her mission. She hadn’t pulled the trigger, but those deaths were on her hands, too.
“Wrong choice.” Drestyn sighed, holstering his gun.
Anke swallowed against the sick squeeze of her stomach as Pabel and Rigby recovered their guns and dragged the bodies onto the ship. “Kind of late for that, isn’t it?” She’d checked the building specs ahead of time; every landing pad had at least three cameras. Hiding the bodies seemed like a moot point.
“Please.” Rigby snorted, shuffling backward up the ramp with an officer dragging limp behind him. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Marei knows what she’s doing,” Drestyn corrected, and on cue, Cobalt Lady—Marei—held a GLASS out for Anke to see. It probably would’ve been helpful, if Anke could’ve gotten her eyes to focus. Or her brain. Her adrenal system was really killing it, though.
Bad choice of words.
Deep breath. She swore she smelled lavender, and she hated that it helped. “The landing pad,” she said, as the pieces finally slotted into place. It was footage of the landing pad, with the rockhopper and the three of them standing off the ship with their hands still up. Ah. “You looped it.”
Marei nodded. Up close, Anke could actually see her face under the bill of her cap: sharp-featured and full-lipped, but not so much of either that Anke would’ve noticed her on the street. Not pretty, but not not pretty. Her eyes looked decidedly catlike, though—angular and appraising—set against skin a little darker than the rest of her face; those, Anke would’ve noticed. Probably smart to keep her hat cocked so low. “Our little secret, for now,” she said, touching a finger to her lips. “It’ll be a minute or two before anyone notices and comes snooping. Don’t waste them.”
“But—” she started. How did you get here? How long have you been here? How do you know Drestyn? They both had the same paramilitary vibe to them. Was there, like, an agitator version of basic training? She’d done all the digging she could do and still didn’t know much about his life between Kepler and now.
She kind of got the sense he liked it that way.
“We like to be prepared,” Drestyn said.
“No kidding.” She knew he’d had his eye on Lewaro for a long time—and on Yarden, more specifically. That was why she’d gone with him, but deep-cover badass was still a serious power move. Deep-cover badass with biometric clearance, she amended as they reached the door and Marei put her eye to the scanner. “Guess my job just got a lot easier.”
Marei chuckled. “Don’t get too excited, little bird,” she said, silkily. “I’m still the new kid on the block; my clearance stops a level up. You want to get to the penthouse, that’s on you.”
Fine by her. Anke had been itching to get her fingers on their security system anyway. Bring on the tasty, tasty firewalls. She’d take block ciphers over bullets any day. “Let’s go, then,” she said, ducking through the door. The stark change from all the wind to the near-silence inside made her ears feel clogged, stuffed full of cotton, but she could still hear every footstep behind her as Drestyn, then Marei, then Rigby filtered in. “No Pabel?”
“Staying with the ship,” said Drestyn. “Hell of a getaway pilot.”
“Damn straight,” said Marei with a glinting grin. Huh. Marei and Pabel. Pabel and Marei. Marbel. Cute, in a kinda scared, kinda horny sort of way. “Besides, somebody’s got to keep our exit clear. You want to put our asses in the hands of Rigby here?”
“Fuck you, too, sister,” Rigby growled back, but even with his piss in my porridge personality type, he still sounded a little fond. Reminded her of the way Nash and Saint always picked at each other.
Oh no you don’t. She swatted the misery-scented thought away and nodded. “Pabel it is. So, do I get to know the plan now?”
“Only if you can walk and talk at the same time,” said Marei. “Time to go to work.”
The plan, it turned out, went like this: Marei, playing the role of Anonymous Security Officer Number Seven, escorted three visitors upstairs from the landing pad. No dramatics, no sneaking around in ventilation shafts; she led them through the security check-in and into a lobby, and they trailed behind her like ducklings. The man at the reception desk barely looked at them, just nodded to Marei and went back to his comm panel, and none of the handful of people lounging around the sitting area even bothered to do that much. The interior design, all light woods and soft greens, looked more like a spa than a corporate nerve center, bathed in light from the floor-to-ceiling windows along the back wall.
Anke stifled a shiver. Yes, logically, she knew that the Admin Building was mostly office space, but seeing the office workers creeped her out. To smell the tannic bitterness of slightly burnt coffee and the mishmash of thirty different lunches being heated and eaten at once. To hear the comms ringing and the lifts dinging and the utter lack of any maniacal chortling floating out from boardrooms clouded with cigar smoke.
To them, it wasn’t Judgment Day. It was just … Tuesday.
“Um,” she began, uneasily, “are we sure those guys told Yarden we were coming?” She’d expected a little more, uh, alarm.
Drestyn shook his head. “Wouldn’t matter if they hadn’t. The second facial rec pinged me, he’d have known about it. He knows we’re here. Probably even knows why.”
“But they don’t?” A pair of women sat on one of the sofas they passed, laughing at something on a GLASS, and a guy stood half-hidden by one of the potted plants, picking something out of his teeth in his reflection in the window. Not exactly red alert behavior.
“Alarms cause panic,” Marei said as they turned the corner into a lift lobby. Nobody there, and weirdly, Anke found herself missing the people. The people were just unexpected; the emptiness was foreboding. Marei didn’t seem to notice, though, floating across the lobby to hit the call button. “Panic is messy. Better to handle it quiet. If it makes you feel better, I’m sure he’s got quite the welcome party waiting upstairs.” As if on cue, the light above one of the lifts blinked on.
Ding!
Anke eyed the opening doors. “So we’re walking into a trap.”
“Of course not. We’re taking the elevator,” Drestyn replied, with that same smile of his. Small, but anticipatory—a fox at the edge of a henhouse, waiting for the door to creak open.
Or rather, waiting for Anke to open it.
With a sigh, she tugged her GLASS from her bag and joined them on the lift. “Going up,” she said as the doors slid closed and the music kicked on. Because of course there’s music. What hilariously terrifying, life-or-death situation was complete without some smooth friggin’ jazz? “Momentarily,” she added at Rigby’s expectant look. She was good, but she was still human.
Rigby, unsurprisingly, was about as good at waiting as he was at small talk. Click. His thumb mashed one of ten unmarked buttons on the top of the panel. Presumably, if you were going up that high, you knew which button you were supposed to press.
When it didn’t light up, Rigby mashed it again.
“You would totally fail the marshmallow test,” Anke said. There’s a button-masher in every group. Anke had her own buttons to worry about. Ugh, she hated this GLASS. No tactile feedback. She missed her tappy keys.
Click.
“I don’t know if you think that’s helping, but it’s not,” she told him without looking up. Minutes, Marei said. They only had minutes before security figured out that they’d looped the feed, and if they weren’t upstairs by then, they’d have more to deal with than Yarden’s top-floor muscle.
Rigby gave her a flat look. Click.
“Rigby, would you—” But before Marei could finish, the lift juddered and went dark. “Little bird? Not trying to tell you how to do your job, but.”
Anke jerked her head, no. “That wasn’t me.” If her fingers moved any faster, she would’ve started throwing out smoke. Shit, shit, shit. “That trap we were talking about?” The lift jolted again, and the air grew heavier, and suddenly they went up a whole lot faster than Anke had in mind.
“Anke, what’s going on?” Still calm. Did Drestyn even know how to lose his shit?
Her screen flared red, but she banished the warnings with a swipe of her hand. Back to the keys, conjuring lines of code across the screen, but she barely even saw the script anymore. It became abstract acts, mapping a path, prodding a locked door. “Those are the emergency brakes decoupling,” she said. Another locked door, another nudge, a little give. You’ll do. “Lift’s going up. Quickly.”
“They’re going to drop us.” Marei didn’t seem to feel the need to paint a picture beyond that. Fifty-something floors in a giant silica box. Crunch. Splat. Boom. Pick your onomatopoeia. “Can you stop it?”
“If I can’t, you won’t have very long to be disappointed,” Anke replied distractedly. Her heart hammered in her throat, but she’d found a shiny little tunnel protocol for remote maintenance—a manufacturer leave-behind, not completely unprotected, but untouched by the top-of-the-line security. She sank her techie teeth into it, felt it give, and a steadiness washed over her. Not calm, but maybe hyperfocus. The dark of the elevator and the red of the alerts and Marei’s voice counting forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine didn’t exist, and all she had to do was—
The lift slowed suddenly, lurching as the emergency brakes re-engaged. On the screen above the button panel 51, 52, 53 crawled by in time with the numbers on her GLASS. “Got you!” she whooped as the lift dinged and the doors began to open. God bless lazy manufacturers and unvoided warranties. “I got you so hard, you—oh.”
Guys. Guns. Guys with guns.
“Cover!” Marei shouted, flattening herself against one side of the lift. It would’ve been a nice warning, if someone hadn’t already grabbed her arm and yanked her against the button panel as the first volley of piezoelectric day-ruiners battered the back wall of the elevator.
She blinked down, expecting to see Drestyn’s hand, but this one had—er, didn’t have—a missing ring finger. “All right, Your Majesty?” said Rigby with a bitter rind of a smile. Something told her it wasn’t his first time being pinned down by enemy fire.
As the resident newbie to the proverbial trenches, she was perfectly happy to hang out against the wall until the first round of shots tapered off.
“Hold,” called a voice from outside the lift. Crisp. Authoritative. Probably the boss of the group, but Anke felt pretty satisfied with the current number of holes in her head, so she didn’t peek to see which of the officers the voice belonged to. “You’re surrounded.”
“Obviously.” Marei rolled her eyes, and Anke felt the improbable burble of a laugh in her chest. Maybe this was their Tuesday. Danger, guns, and small-scale revolutions.
Shockingly, Mister Boss Man didn’t find it as funny as Anke did. “Put your guns on the ground and come out with your hands up.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Drestyn replied. “But we’re not here for you, so if you put your guns down and step against the wall over there, you don’t have to die today.” Which was awfully big talk for someone outnumbered almost two to one and trapped in a lift. “It’s your choice.”
Another choice. Anke wondered if Drestyn always did that—if he always gave people a chance to choose their fate. To pick a side, even if the side was just keeping your own ass alive. Had he given the mercs on Noether the same choice? Stand down or die?
If he had, they must’ve chosen the same as Yarden’s firing squad. They answered with another volley of shots that pinged and fizzled against the back wall of the lift. So much electricity in such a small space, Anke tasted ozone. Her teeth buzzed and her hair stood on end, blood roaring in her ears as she waited for the firing squad to make a move.
In the end, it wasn’t theirs to make.
“You tried,” Marei said, with the air of someone who hadn’t expected things to go any differently. Unhappy, but unsurprised. “Ready?”
Drestyn frowned, not so much with his mouth as with his whole body—shoulders sinking, frame bending inward under a gravity that looked too much like guilt. “Go.”
Ten shots. Why she counted, Anke didn’t know, but each one seared a line in her mind’s eye. Ten shots, spread almost evenly between Marei, Rigby, and Drestyn, and silence fell like a thick, velvet curtain across the lift lobby.
Ten shots, and they’d killed them all.
Anke couldn’t bring herself to look past the doorway of the lift for too long. She’d miscounted before—eight, not seven—and she told herself that it mattered. That it wasn’t just another body on the floor, but a life. A future and a family and a funeral, and it twisted something horrible in her chest to see them that way, but the alternative was worse. The moment she started seeing numbers instead of people she’d be no better than leeches like Yarden. It was supposed to hurt.
It just wasn’t supposed to stop her.
“Wait,” Rigby yelped as she slid past him into the lift lobby, nose buried in her GLASS and feet mapping a careful course between bodies and bloodstains on the polished tiles. “Let us clear it first, for fuck’s sake.”
She raised her tablet briefly above her head to show the screen. “Cameras,” she called back. “Floor’s clear.” Not much to it, honestly. The building tapered at the top; smaller floors, more exclusive. A conference room opened on the other side of the lobby wall, separated by opaque hologlass; and down the hall, an assistant’s desk sat in front of an office that was probably the same size as or bigger than the rest of the floor. “Got you three, those eight, and zip and nilch in the office and conference room, respectively.”
“Poor bastards,” Rigby muttered. “Benches and benjamina trees—not a scrap of decent cover. Never stood a chance.”
Clothing rustled, and Anke glanced back to see Marei and Rigby shifting the bodies out of the middle of the floor. Didn’t make a lot of sense at first; they weren’t expecting company like back at the landing pad. But as she watched, Marei leaned over one of the officers, brushing open eyes closed with a gentle hand and folding his arms over his chest. It wasn’t strategy; it was decency. “They weren’t supposed to stand a chance,” Marei said, soft but metalline. “They were cannon fodder.”
Anke turned away as Drestyn joined her at the door. “Yarden would’ve left them here,” he said. “Kill us or stall us. Either way, he had time to slip out. You have the office feeds?”
“Office. Landing pads. Breakrooms.” She allowed herself a small, triumphant fist pump as the card reader turned green and Drestyn opened the door for her. The gentleman agitator—sounded like the tagline of a movie or something. A book, maybe. He seemed more the literary type. “Did you know they have espresso machines on every floor? Of course you didn’t. I mean, you wouldn’t, I guess. It has literally nothing to do with what we’re doing. I’m not even sure why I’m telling you about it. I’m fine, it’s just…”
Her eyes lit on the desk in the corner, bow-shaped and topped with a single curving monitor that made her itch for a high-graphics RPG game and a barrel of cheese puffs. “Hello, beautiful.” She didn’t quite run for it, but she came close enough that the chair rolled when she landed. Cue the ungraceful shuffle of shame back to the front of the desk, hands hovering reverently over the built-in consoles for a moment.
Drestyn hung back, lingering by the half-moon of couches on the other side of the office. Magazines on the table, paintings and awards on the wall, even a stress ball on the desk with the Trust’s omnipresent logo. The office looked lived in. Real. It smelled of fruity-musky cologne and a whiff of industrial cleaner. A bookshelf in the corner held actual paper books and a framed picture of a man and woman standing in front of a sunset with wide, happy smiles on their faces. A monster’s den wasn’t supposed to look like this. No bones or glittering golden hoards, just the trappings of a nine-to-five and a guy just doing his job.
Somehow that made it so much worse.
“Marei says the panic room’s on a lower floor,” Drestyn said, jostling her out of her head. Her hero. Turned out the heroes weren’t quite what she’d expected, either. “Can you find it?”
Anke plugged in her tablet and basked in the light of high-res silica. The whole station lay at her fingertips—every thread of the web, every system and schematic and subroutine. “With this rig? Hah. I could find a flea on a rat on the other side of the station.”
“Just the rat’ll do.” He smiled again, that quiet, predatory smile. “I think it’s time we spring a trap of our own.”