CHAPTER TWELVE
1664
YEAR OF THE CRUX
The Gunner
Orbiting Silt
Jun dreams of Great Gra, showing her how to clean the Som’s Edge pistol. Everything is muscle memory for him, weathered hands moving instinctively—the hands of a lifelong artisan. His eyes, once the color of dark wheat, have turned milky with cataracts, but his mind is a razor.
“You’re going to have to hide,” he says.
She shakes her head no, feels pinpricks of terror on her skin. “No. I don’t want to.”
But he hands her the gun, all its clean lines gleaming. It’s heavy in her hand, and her hand is heavy—like the rest of her, and she wakes in a fugue of memory.
A bed. Familiar, lumpy mattress. Quilted blanket caught around her waist. A single shelf against the wall, stacked with volumes of the peculiar Katish poetry Liis likes. The metal bulkhead above her has small embedded lights like stars, dimmed to a distant glow, as known to her as Liis’s black cap, or the shop on K-5. Home.
She tries to sit up and all those warm feelings short out. Pain lances through her torso. She gasps, chokes, cursing all six of the gods and the Godfire twice. Fuck, her shoulder hurts. It’s swathed in bandages and throbbing like a heartbeat. Her head is throbbing, too, a pain distinctly chemical, meaning Liis must have knocked her out with something. That tracks. The last thing she remembers is trying to fly The Gunner while blood ran down her arm, and Liis growling at her to “Lie down, damnit!” but she was too frantic with adrenaline to listen. Next thing, she’d blacked out. Liis always was the sort to carry sedatives on her.
Jun cranes her neck to look at her shoulder, though even that much movement sends frissons of icy fire through her nerves. The bandages are fresh and clean. She must have been lying here for hours. That means a lot of things, but most of all, they’re not dead. Or caught, though the woman hunting them could be a hairsbreadth away for all she knows.
The woman hunting them.
Jun thinks of the tall, broad-shouldered cleric who led the attack on the roof. It’s easy enough to access her ocular records, pinpoint a still frame, and then feed it through the public hubs. A moment later she’s got an ID. Cleric Chono, the record states, no family name. Jun flits through the woman’s biography until she finds the important piece: novitiate to Esek Nightfoot, 1648–1653.
When this Cleric Chono called her Six, Jun thought she must have been talking to Masar, but he showed no recognition. And then she spoke that other name, Esek’s name, tossed down like a gauntlet. Thinking of her now gives Jun the determination to throw her legs over the bedside and stand.
It goes poorly at first. She jostles her arm and nearly faints. There’s a good thirty seconds of standing still and willing herself to remain conscious, before she finally makes it to the tiny bathroom in the corner. Sitting down to pee is harder than she expects. Splashing water on her face is harder still. She ignores the trembling in her fingers and the grayish face staring at her in the mirror, and weaves unsteadily back into the bedroom. Cleric Chono’s hologram is still hanging where she left it, record pocked with commendations and, oddly, lacking any scandals but one. Jun peers curiously at a headline from a conspiracy website:
CLERIC MURDERS CLERIC ON QUIETUS. KINDOM HUSHES IT UP.
There’s something vague about a sex crime, and the Khen family. Claims that Cleric Chono must have learned her murderous impulses from Esek Nightfoot. Jun stares at the cleric’s solemn, unremarkable face, Teron in structure; fine inky black hair worn short; a squareness to her head and shoulders; eyes the color of station metal, with no overt glimmer of evil. Jun has always measured Hands by how many civilians they murder. Let them kill each other all they want. But there’s no evidence in the logs that Chono has used her position to terrorize, even as Esek’s novitiate.
So why is she helping Esek now?
Jun flicks the records away, still nauseated and unsteady. She notices for the first time the pneumatic injector on the bedside table, no doubt loaded with her next dose of tissue regenerator. She distinctly recalls seeing a chunk of her shoulder blown off when one of Esek’s novitiates shot her on the roof. It’ll take a minute to grow back. No wonder she’s in so much pain. But that injector will have a sedative in it, and probably knock her out again, for hours. She turns away, limping toward the door to the bridge.
It’s less than five feet but feels like a mile, and when she gets there, she has to muscle the door open with her good side. Except she doesn’t seem to have a good side right now, and when the door gives, she falls forward.
Instantly, another body is there, slinging an arm around her.
“Gods, what are you doing?” Liis demands, pulling her out of the doorway. For a moment they’re close to each other, Jun’s nose pressed to Liis’s throat, and she gets in one deep inhale of her skin, a green smell, slightly sweaty. Liis pulls back enough to cradle her face, check her eyes, and frown. “You should be in bed.”
“And miss the party?” Jun looks at Masar. The ship’s bridge is small, and he fills up a good chunk of it, sprawled on the mini sofa they keep in the back for catnaps. He sits up as soon as he sees her, brow knotted. “Get that look off your face,” she mutters.
He rolls his eyes. “Come sit down, you damn fool.”
She sinks into the command chair, barely having the energy to swivel toward them. Liis comes at her with a syrette of something, stabbing it into her uninjured collarbone.
“Fuck!” she cries. But already the cool relief of morpho starts to spread. She almost sobs with gratitude, but forces it down. “That better not knock me out. Seriously, what the fuck did you give me? I can barely walk.”
“The blast burn went straight to the bone, Jun.” Liis stands with muscled arms crossed over her chest, the seam of her prosthetic arm distinct against her bared bicep. She’s not wearing her cap, and the short black twists of her hair are an attractive riot around her face—a momentary distraction for Jun, until Liis demands, “Do you not remember all the bleeding and screaming?”
Jun scowls. “I remember trying to get the Hood up on the ship.”
Liis nods her concession. “You did that, too. You also lost two pints of blood. I had to take a transfusion from Hawks.”
“Take is right,” Masar pipes up. “Your girl here doesn’t ask nicely. If I hadn’t offered straight off, I think she would have strung me up and drained me dry.”
He says it like it’s a joke, but of course it isn’t. Liis can be a little intense. A fact reinforced by the way she looks at Jun. “You’re lucky you’re a universal recipient.”
Jun scoffs. Luck indeed. She changes the subject. “Where are we? How did we get through the planet shields without dropping the Hood? And how did you get from Ma’kess System to here with all the gates shut down? You’ve been ignoring my comms for two days!”
Liis presses her lips together in a line. Her eyes, dark as oil spills, hint at equal parts amusement and exasperation. She begins to count answers off on her fingers.
“We are orbiting the Silt moon, Hood on. You may be the genius, but I know how to run your programs, all right? We dropped the Hood long enough to get through the shields, and then raised it again. There are hundreds of ships out there right now. No one had a chance to even notice us before we disappeared. As for me, I stowed away on an essential supplies transport to Teros. I had to turn my neural link off until we docked in Lo-Meek.”
Jun gawps at her. “You stowed away? Why the fuck did you do that?”
Liis raises an eyebrow feathered with silver scar tissue. “You know if I hadn’t, you’d be dead, right?”
“They’re cracking down on stowaways! They’ve got cloaksaan patrolling the ships!” That word, always so heavy between them, lands with force. Liis frowns. Jun barrels on, “If they had found you, you’d be—”
“I was not in danger of the Cloaksaan finding me,” says Liis. She doesn’t say, though her expression adds, Or have you forgotten that most cloaksaan learned concealment from me? Jun rolls her eyes at Liis’s subtle version of bragging. “And anyway, do you think you’re in a position to lecture me on recklessness?” Liis’s low voice is cool as a Katish stream. “You risked your life for a godsdamned memory coin.”
Jun fully intends to continue this argument—but the reminder of the coin jolts her. Suddenly her anger, the pain in her shoulder, her residual questions about the battle at the Cliffs all take a back seat. She glares at Masar, already on the verge of accusing him.
He snorts. “I would have. Except I didn’t know if you’d broken the encryption or not.”
Jun smiles, slow and self-satisfied. “I did.”
At once he leans forward, eyes flaring with hungry hope. “Show me.”
This time, Lucos Alanye’s memories of the nameday party are crystalline, soaked in color and sound. Children laughing brightly; adults braying and raucous; the clinking of dishware and the soft thump as the hired acrobat lands a standing backflip, to oohs and aahs. A summer sun bleeds through the curtains, drenching everything in gold.
“Look at these people,” says someone directly beside Alanye. “Do you think the Moonbacks will show up?”
“Keep your mouth shut,” says Alanye, and Jun’s breath catches at his voice, its growly affect—something he was known for.
“Som’s ass! Being in charge has made you stuffy! I’m just trying to entertain myself.”
“The heir to the Nightfoot dynasty is ten feet away,” mutters Alanye, his own gaze fixed on the prim and stoic Alisiana. “And you’re bored?”
The other guard grumbles, but says no more, and a shout goes up from the children as the acrobat spins and flips. Alisiana doesn’t seem to have noticed. Then Caskori Nightfoot steps into view, transforming her somber expression to one of joy. The second guard whistles lowly.
“Fires! This just got interesting.”
“Be quiet.”
Caskori crouches beside his niece, returning her adoring smile as he holds out the gift. She withdraws the sphere of jevite, eyes widening in pretty delight. Jun half expects to hear Alanye gasp, but of course he doesn’t. When he strides toward them, Jun imagines urgency in his steps, but there’s no way to know—
“Excuse me, Saan.” The two Nightfoots look up at him with twin expressions of annoyance, a common heritage in their noses and cheekbones. “I apologize for the interruption, but I’m instructed to scan all gifts. It will only take a moment.”
Caskori is a minor Nightfoot. He has no right to deny the matriarch’s guardsaan, much as he may want to. Alisiana looks to her uncle for guidance, but when Caskori doesn’t challenge Alanye, something flits across the child’s face—the briefest, most potent flash of rage, that Jun had simply mistaken for a sulk the first time. It’s there and gone in an instant, or else perhaps she weaves the feeling into a curse, depositing it on the jevite sphere, and into Alanye’s hand.
“Thank you, Bright Daughter.” Alanye lifts the sphere to his face, clearly scanning it with his ocular. Such scans take two seconds, maybe three. But he stares at it for ten. Jun strains for the sound of his heartbeat, thump thump thumping like her own.
“May I ask where you acquired this, Sa?” Alanye asks at last.
Caskori says peevishly, “From a metalsaan on K-5 station, off Kator. It’s tenth-century jevite. An antique. Kata’s tit, don’t smudge it; it’s worth more than your life.”
Alanye doesn’t react, though privately he must be disgusted at Caskori for not knowing the difference between antique jevite and jevite that’s been recently mined. Those bright red veins in black stone are a dead giveaway. He returns the sphere to Alisiana. “Thank you, Saan.”
“All right, then,” snaps Caskori. “Get back to your post.”
This is where the original memory ended. Which is part of why it startles Jun so much when a gun goes off. She jumps, and beside her, Masar leans sharply forward. On the cast, Caskori shouts. Alanye throws himself over Alisiana as the crack of a second shot echoes out and for several seconds it’s hard to tell what’s going on. There is screaming. Alanye gets back up, charging someone. Jun sees a face, a rictus of fury, and then there are more faces and arms and bodies as the guards tackle the shooter to the ground. Alanye snaps, “Don’t kill him.”
Over the cries of the partygoers, Jun hears the shooter sobbing something in a language she recognizes, but can’t understand. She spins up her translator, and the words break off in a grunt. The shooter abruptly falls limp, the back of his head bloody from the ram of a rifle butt.
“Lissy!” someone cries.
Alanye spins around. A throng of guardsaan have circled the heiress, and Caskori stands outside plaintively calling for her, like a puppy denied its mother.
“Lissy, are you hurt?!” he cries.
“The assassin is down,” Alanye says.
They relax their circle. All around, the panicked guests are being cleared from the room, and Alanye is muttering orders into his comm as he watches the small figure emerge from her protection. Alisiana is pale but composed, her posture erect as she absorbs her surroundings. Though Caskori clearly wants to throw himself at her, she exudes such authority in that moment that he doesn’t dare. Yes, here is the Alisiana Nightfoot who will lead her family for decades.
Alanye bows to her. “Bright Daughter. We have the shooter in custody and are taking him down to the prisons for interrogation. We will ascertain how he got a gun into this room. All entries in and out of the palace have been locked down. The guardsaan are searching your guests and everyone else on the grounds to be sure of no accomplices. My ocular shows you are uninjured, but I’ve sent for a doctor anyway.”
“I’m fine,” Alisiana says, clipped. “Someone should tell my mother. She’s speaking with trade partners in the east wing.”
“I’ve sent her a message as well.”
Alisiana nods, assessing him with a cool frankness that seems out of place on a child. Her eyes drop, settling lower on his body. “You’re bleeding.”
The view weaves as Alanye looks down at himself, and there’s a brief glimpse of something red before he looks up again.
“I’m all right, Sa. It’s only a blast burn and my armor got most of it.”
She continues staring at his injury. Then she looks back at the throne where she was seated before. She remarks, “My ocular suggests if you hadn’t moved to cover me, I would have been shot in the head. And I haven’t got any armor.”
Caskori makes a sound of alarm. Alisiana, however, looks unperturbed. If anything, she seems to find the whole thing… interesting. This is probably the first time anyone has tried to assassinate her.
“I suppose you saved my life, then.”
“It is our duty, Sa.”
A dry smile touches the corner of the future matriarch’s mouth. “You moved swiftly and efficiently, and you already have Verdant on lockdown. You appear to be the only one hurt, and you saved the life of the future matriarch of the Nightfoots. My mother will give you a commission for this if you want it.” Then, after a moment’s thought, “I’d better put a claim on you first, before she snatches you out from under me.”
Alanye doesn’t respond at first. Perhaps he, like Jun, is unnerved by the child’s droll tone, by the sharpness in her bright eyes, all signifying the acumen and calculation of a seasoned political operative. She is like a tiny, deadly general.
Finally, Alanye says, “I’m at your service, Bright Daughter. With your permission I’d like to interrogate the shooter when he wakes.”
“Of course.”
“And you’ll kill him after,” says Caskori, reasserting himself with a waspish look. There’s sweat on his purpled brow. “You’ll execute him for this, do you understand? Get what you can and then kill him!”
There’s a moment of silence. Alisiana looks at her uncle in a way Jun can’t interpret, but which she doubts is impressed. Alanye finally responds, “I must do whatever the matriarch requests.”
“You are mine now,” Alisiana replies, her cold stare shifting from Caskori to Alanye with mechanical exactness. “I’m claiming you for my own guard. You’ll do as I say, and I say my uncle is right. Find out if the man has family or friends here. They’ll have to be eliminated, too. You have your orders, Sa…?” She trails off with a question in her gaze.
“Alanye,” Alanye says.
“Alanye,” she repeats, so the word sounds like an echo in the room. “You have your orders. Be sure to upload your ocular record before you go down to the prisons.”
The projection ends.
In silence they stare at the empty air where the hologram hung mere moments ago. Jun replays the events with an archivist’s rigor, trying to be dispassionate, but failing. She’s not sure if what she’s feeling is elation, or panic. This is… so much more than she bargained for.
She looks at Liis first, but her expression is far away. The burn scars on her jaw have whitened, the way they do when she grits her teeth. Lost in thought. Transported to her past life, when she, too, killed people—and their families. Jun hates the sight of it and tries to draw her back into the present.
“The assassin was the acrobat,” she says.
Liis hmms but doesn’t look at her.
Jun adds, “And the acrobat was a Jeveni.” She looks at Masar, expecting some kind of reaction. He scrubs a hand down his face, which is pale. She prods him, “He was speaking Je. You must have understood him.”
Liis swivels toward Masar. “You speak Je?”
He gives her a sidelong look. “Yes.”
Liis casts her own link to the video file and, with a swift rotation of her wrist, rewinds to the moment when the acrobat wept and cursed in the grip of the guardsaan. The five-spoked wheel tattoo on his cheekbone is distinct. Liis asks Masar, “What’s he saying?”
Jun is sure Liis has her own translator working, but she doesn’t question the ask—even if it surprises her. Masar clears his throat, and translates, “Autonomy for Jeve. Death to thieves.”
Liis regards him silently for a moment. Looking uncomfortable, Masar mutters, “Not much of an assassin, was he?”
“It was an impetuous move,” Liis says. Her unblinking stare finally shifts to Jun. “When he saw the jevite sphere, he panicked. Death to thieves.”
Yes. Like Alanye, the acrobat would have recognized what the sphere was, and what it meant. What it threatened. A renewal of the trade.
“Even if Alanye tortured him alone, there would be a cast recording of it,” says Jun. “If Alisiana realized that there was still jevite on the moon, there’s no way she could ignore that.”
“It’s not proof that the Nightfoots were involved in the genocide,” says Liis.
“It’s proof they were involved in Alanye’s mission on Jeve,” Jun retorts.
“It’s not even that.”
“It may as well be.”
Liis lets out her breath, slow and even, her dark eyes fixed on the image of the acrobat’s agonized face. “Yes. It may as well be.”
Masar says, “No wonder Esek Nightfoot is after us.”
At the mention of Esek, Jun’s stomach swoops. After the genocide, the Jeveni were displaced from their moon and cut off from any means of self-determination. When Alisiana Nightfoot gave them work in her factories, she gilded her reputation for decades to come. Because while the citizens of the Treble may disdain the Jeveni, what happened on Jeve itself is considered the greatest atrocity of the millennium. It’s taught in schools. Memorialized in art and law and literal stone. The entire Alanye family was exiled over it, and Lucos died in an alley. To be implicated in the Jeveni Genocide is to be cursed, by the Godfire and all its child gods.
Jun knows now why she’s on the wrong end of this furious hunt. She even understands why an apparently righteous cleric like Chono is involved. Jun thought she was buying a coin that would simply embarrass the Nightfoots, provide leverage to their enemies, something sweet and scandalous that the Moonbacks or the Khens would pay well to control. But this coin… It would weaken the Nightfoots’ already weak leadership, and make the already striking Jeveni revolt, and destabilize an unstable universe. Chaos, under the Kindom. Disunity, in the Treble.
It could finish the Nightfoots, once and for all.
And Jun has never seen herself as the type to burn down worlds, but something curls in her belly now, like hunger, like lust. To destroy the Nightfoots… to utterly destroy them—
Jun’s head jerks toward Liis, finds her standing with arms crossed and face blank.
“What?”
Liis’s eyes are cold, the way she gets sometimes when she’s wrestling her memories—or gearing up for a fight. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking… sell it to the Moonbacks. Or sell it to the Khens. Let them tear the Nightfoots in half. Right?”
Jun rolls her shoulders back, a gesture that wakens her injury, sending little tendrils of pain like tree roots through her body. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Liis shakes her head, like she can’t believe Jun has to ask. The specter of her disapproval makes Jun tense. More pain. More blood, rushing through her veins. Adrenaline starting to quicken, like prey on the run.
“Do you really want to see another family rise in their wake? Would the Moonbacks or the Khens or even the Paiyes be any better than the Nightfoots? Because one of them will fill the hole that’s left behind. And if not them, the Kindom.”
This will be what Liis fears most of all: the Kindom’s power, unchecked. Right now, the Hands may control the gates, but they don’t control the sevite, nor the industries surrounding the sevite. That other, corrupt families monopolize those industries is cold comfort, but at least no one in the Treble controls everything. If the Nightfoots fell, and the Kindom managed to take over the sevite trade, then the very cloaks whom Liis once fled would become—what? Invincible? Nothing could terrify her more.
“Maybe it wouldn’t happen like that,” Jun says.
“How else could it possibly happen?”
Jun opens her mouth—and closes it. All the hunger for revenge that had sparked in her belly goes out, replaced by a curl of dread. She pictures Liis taking the coin. Grinding it to dust under her boot. Winking out not only Jun’s revenge, but her payday. Something she needs.
“We’re not destroying it,” Jun says with borrowed confidence. “It’s worth millions.”
“It’s worth nothing if Esek Nightfoot hunts us into the ground.”
“All the more reason to cut her off at the knees!”
“A woman like that… You have to take a lot more than her knees.”
That’s true, but—
“I won’t let you sell it to a First Family,” Liis says. “Not something this powerful. We’ve got to have some standards.”
“That’s no better than protecting the Nightfoots.”
A stubborn shrug. “It’s what I can live with, Jun.”
Then for a moment they are at an impasse, gazes locked and neither willing to bend. They’ve stood at cross-purposes before, but never with so much at stake. Jun swallows, surprised at the thick feeling of nausea rising up her throat. She feels a little dizzy, sweat breaking out on her forehead and back. The pain in her shoulder radiates outward.
And then, quietly, Masar tells them, “You don’t have to sell it to a First Family.”
They look at him together. He lifts his chin, defiant. “Sell it to me. Sell it to my buyer.”
Taken off guard, Jun cocks her head. More pain, echoing down her spine. She ignores it. She thought his buyer was First Family.
“Who’s your buyer, then?” Liis asks. “Terrorists?”
He glowers at her. “No. Not terrorists.”
“So who?” Jun demands.
He hesitates, lips working, words caught between his teeth. And then—
“The Jeveni.”
Jun waits for a longer sentence, for a delayed punch line. When none comes, she answers blankly, “What?”
Masar tells her, “I’m Jeveni, Jun. My buyer is a Jeveni collective.”
Jun’s head swivels toward Liis, expecting to see astonishment on her face, but her expression is flat, as if—
“You knew?”
Liis shrugs one shoulder, unperturbed. “I put it together a few minutes ago.”
“Like hell you did, you—” She looks at Masar again. “You’re Jeveni?”
His eyes harden. “You can stop saying it like it’s a curse word, thanks.”
“Fuck you, Masar, you’ve been lying to me since we—”
He stands abruptly. He’s big as a house, and Liis’s body flexes like a cat about to spring. “I’m the liar? I’m the liar, Jun Ironway?” Jun can only gape at him; he sneers. “Yeah, you think I didn’t catch what that archivist called you? You think I don’t know who the Ironways are? What happened on K-5? People said back then there was an Ironway kid who was at school in Riin Kala when it happened. That she disappeared right afterward. I assumed the Cloaksaan got you. But they didn’t, did they? You must have run.”
Run!
Jun blinks. The name Ironway travels down through her limbs, leaves her hot and weak. She has spent years concealing that name, sequestering it within herself. To hear it out of the archivist’s mouth was like having armor stripped from her body. To hear Masar say it leaves her naked. And it doesn’t help that he’s right. If he’s lied to her about his identity, it’s no less than she’s lied to him.
Inanely she says, “You don’t have a tattoo.” Like that’s the fucking thing that matters. Masar looks coldly amused. “I thought they were considered holy, or—”
It’s the wrong thing to say. His expression darkens. “Yes, they are holy. They mark belonging and devotion. But you people have turned them into a way to single us out. If I take mine off now and then so I can move in the Treble without getting slaughtered like that Jeveni acrobat, how is that different from a Hood program?”
Jun holds up her hands. “Fuck’s sake, sorry! I—this is just a bit unexpected, okay? I’m not used to working with Jeveni. You tend to keep to yourselves. And I always sort of assumed you hated the rest of us.”
He doesn’t relax, watching her, and Jun is still irrationally mad at him for knowing she’s an Ironway. What if he knows the truth about Liis, too? Jun can bear to have herself exposed, but not Liis.
Which reminds her—
She looks at Liis eagerly. “The Jeveni! They’re not a First Family! You can’t object to selling it to them! If anyone deserves to have the coin, then—”
Liis talks over her. “Is your buyer connected to the sevite factories? Information like this, it will hurt the trade. Could hurt the Jeveni in the process.”
Masar narrows his eyes with nearly comic skepticism. Jun supposes it’s not every day he runs into someone who shows concern for the well-being of the Jeveni. Especially now, when every other news cast Jun sees is about Treblen resentment of the coming Remembrance Day.
“My buyer has no intention of hurting their own people.”
Jun says, “Then you’d use it in the labor negotiations. Right?”
It makes beautiful sense, actually. If the unions had this information, they could hold it over the Nightfoots. Get what they want, what they need—raise themselves above the role of feudal subjects and maybe even achieve some real power in the sevite trade. Yet the way Masar looks at her betrays nothing. Whatever the agenda of his buyer, he’s not about to spill.
Jun redirects. “Okay. Then answer me this: Can your buyer afford to pay what it’s worth? No offense, but the Jeveni aren’t known for their riches.”
Masar’s smile is cool. “We can pay you enough to make it worth your while.”
So, less than it’s worth. But still—much more lucrative than dropping it out an airlock. She’s about to ask for more specific numbers when Liis interrupts, sounding annoyed, “It is not a matter of money.”
Masar and Jun look at her. Jun makes an incredulous sound.
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Masar demands. “If we can pay you, why not—”
“The only reason we’re alive is because we are Hooded and hiding. If we contact your buyer, we give Esek Nightfoot a potential lead. We put ourselves at risk again. And we put your buyer in her sights. You should consider that.”
“It’s considered,” he answers. “Now let me tell you something you should consider.”
“I’m listening,” says Liis.
“No matter what you do—crush the coin, sell it to us—Esek Nightfoot will never stop. She’s the kind that hunts to the death, and just because you destroy her family doesn’t mean you’ll destroy her.”
Jun demands, “What’s your point?”
“The money is one thing, but what you really need is protection. I’ve spoken to my people about it. They’re ready to help you.”
“Help us how?” asks Liis.
“Hide you. Hide you where you can’t be found.”
The words feel like a net, dropped on Jun’s body. For a moment she doesn’t react, taking too long to understand what he means. Then, pain spikes outward from her shoulder, a heavy throb answering in the base of her skull. She flinches and pushes back in her chair. A retreat, with nowhere to go. No, no, no, not that—
“Say more,” Liis orders.
“No,” Jun mutters, blinking fuzzily, dread coiling through her. Her throat feels tight. There’s a buzzing in her ears. Pull it together. Just fucking—pull it together!
Masar says, “There’s more to the Jeveni than sevite factory workers and poor isolationists. We’ve survived the violence of the Kindom, and of these systems, more creatively than even you could imagine. And that means knowing how to hide when we need to. My buyer wants to extend those services to you both.”
“No.” Jun says it again, louder this time, forcing her vision to clear. She stares at Masar and she hates him, just for saying those words. Irrational, uncontrollable hatred. “No,” she hisses. “We’re not hiding.”
“Jun.” Liis’s voice has a warble to it, far away beyond the bounds of the fugue gathering around Jun, a feeling like suffocation. Jun watches Liis make a placating gesture, Easy, easy… Jun swallows, staring at the ground and squeezing the armrests of her chair. Rage and terror wrestle each other for supremacy, rearing up against Masar’s offer, and against the memory of Great Gra—
Run!
Masar sounds incredulous. “Am I missing something? You two are a couple of con artists. You must have had to go into hiding before.”
“We have,” says Liis, “but—”
“You’re not sticking us in a hole somewhere,” Jun growls.
“Jun, we have to think of our lives, here. We could at least—”
“No.” Jun’s mouth is dry, but sweat beads on her upper lip. She wipes it off and looks at Liis with eyes wide and dry and burning. “No.”
Liis goes quiet, knowing better than to argue. But not about to concede, either. Liis is the one who fled the Brutal Hand when no cloak had ever done it before; she’s the one who cauterized her own arm and spent ten months in an underground safe house; she knows, above anything, how to survive. She will do what’s necessary to survive, without ego. Masar’s offer to protect them must appeal to her, even as it repulses Jun. But she has never made Jun do something that Jun didn’t agree to, and so after long moments her face settles with determination.
She looks at Masar. “Tell your buyer no. No deal.”
And Jun knew she was going to say that, but the fury still soars through her like a hot wind. She grinds her teeth. “That’s not what I said.”
Liis is implacable, cold. “You can’t have both.”
“Oh yes I fucking can. If the Jeveni can pay us, then we’re getting paid.”
“We can pay you,” Masar interjects. “And we can protect you. We—”
“We don’t need your godsdamned protection,” Jun snaps.
“We don’t need his money, either.”
“Of course we do!”
“Jun!” Liis’s voice is like a slap, her oil-slick eyes fiery. “You need to calm down.”
But Jun can’t calm down. She feels like she’s choking. Fire needles its way down her arm and through her chest, but it’s not more powerful than her determination.
“It’s my coin, Liis. It’s my choice.”
Even as she says it, she knows the cardinal rule it breaks: partnership, in everything. Decisions, made together. Liis’s nostrils flare.
“Are you really going to do this for the sake of money?”
Jun gapes at her, any guilt she feels evaporating at Liis’s incomprehensible words. What is she talking about? The money—it’s not money, is it? Money is just the method, the key. It’s the lock that matters, and the thing behind the lock, the thing she’s been trying to get back to, all her life. How can Liis say the money doesn’t matter when she of all people knows what the money is for? The for is what matters. What always has mattered. More than anything.
But Liis lands a killing blow—
“What good are you to your family if you lead Esek right to them?”
Jun feels it like thunder inside her skull. Her eyes burn, her body burns. The anger and disappointment in Liis’s eyes are enough to crack her resolve—but not to break it.
“Give me time to think,” she says, humiliated by the desperation in her own voice, by the pleading in her eyes, as she looks at Liis. Liis, who is beginning to melt around the edges, a halo obscuring the corners of Jun’s vision in concert with the spreading fire in her torso. She pushes it down. “We can find a way. I can—”
Liis shakes her head. There’s pleading in her eyes, too. “It’s too risky.”
“What, you never want us to take a risk again?”
“A con knows when to cut and run, Jun. I want us to survive.”
Jun leaps up. “I want more than that!”
No amount of surging adrenaline can prevent her body’s response, prevent the agony that spreads out into every muscle and limb. She gasps, gags, has to brace herself on the command chair and fears for a moment her knees are going to buckle. A corona of pain pulses around her head, and beyond it she hears Liis’s voice.
“You need your next dose.”
Liis walks out of the room. By the time she comes back, Jun’s vision has only barely cleared; she’s breathing hard and drenched in sweat. She can see the pneumatic injector in Liis’s hand, and the determined look on Liis’s face. Jun holds up a hand.
“No. Just—just hold on.”
“You’re about to faint,” Liis says flatly.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“We can’t give up,” Jun pleads. “We’re so close, Liis. We can’t just give up!”
“Let’s talk about it when you’re feeling better.”
“No!” The whole right side of her body screams. She keeps herself upright by ferocious will alone. She’s aware she sounds like a child, an irrational, reckless child, and in her thoughts, she is a child, the child that so many years ago—
Masar says cautiously, “Jun, you don’t look well.”
She blinks at him. Wonders how she didn’t see it before. Wonders how a little thing like a tattoo stopped her from seeing him: another runaway, just like her.
Liis steps toward her slowly, holding her arms out at her sides, as if Jun were a wild animal that needs careful handling. Jun feels like a wild animal, a creature backed into a corner, who sees its liberty just out of reach, who snarls and thrashes—but can’t get there.
“Okay, Jun,” Liis says. “Okay. We’ll talk about it, all right? Once you’re feeling better, I promise, we can talk about it.”
“Don’t fucking patronize me,” Jun snaps, even as her lover’s soft voice acts like a tonic, lowering her defenses in spite of herself.
“I’m not,” Liis murmurs. “I’m not.”
Now they are standing right in front of each other, eyes level. Liis reaches out one cautious hand to touch her side, a gesture of appeasement, of apology. Against her will, Jun softens. Against her will, this is what she wants—this tenderness, this warmth. To be alone with Liis and to feel, even for a moment, that she is safe…
In a flash, Liis pulls her shirt up, stabbing the injector right into her hip. It goes through her like a laser beam.
“Motherfucker!” she cries, jerking away, stumbling.
“Shit,” Masar drawls.
Jun’s legs turn to water underneath her, the potency of the sedative making sound and space contort. She’s about to fall when she feels herself hoisted up into Liis’s arms.
“You… asshole…” Jun mumbles.
And passes out.