CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1664

YEAR OF THE CRUX

The Gunner

Orbiting Silt

This time, she wakes like a gun going off. A cry catches in her throat, and her body, filmed with sweat, locks up. She lies shivering, gasping at the light-speckled bulkhead above her that warps and tunnels like a journey through a jump gate.

It’s happened before. She’s an old hand at this now. Breathe, she tells herself, imagining it is Liis’s voice. Breathe. It’s only after what feels like hours of trembling effort that she remembers to exhale as well as inhale, and oxygen floods her brain. It takes minutes more to get her heart rate under control. To get the feeling back in her fingers and toes.

Why does this still happen? It was more than ten years ago. Sometimes it feels like the whole Treble has flooded the space between her and that day when Great Gra’s message came through on her comm. Until moments like this, when it might as well be happening all over again, her ocular pinging an alert:

sunstep

sunstep

sunstep

She remembers blinking at the words. The family glyph, a footprint in a circle of gold—rendered as a code word. She’d squinted, not even aware her hearing had started to fuzz, her heartbeat quickening—all behind a veil of confusion and disbelief. It was in that baffled state that the fourth message appeared:

RUN!

And she had. And she had never stopped.

Jun’s throat is parched. She moves her arm and finds the searing agony has retreated to a deep ache. The second dose appears to have done its job. She considers sitting up but decides against it, lies motionless, staring at the ceiling and thinking of the near hysteria that gripped her before Liis jammed the injector into her hip. That fucker.

A sound of voices through the wall piques her interest. No, one voice. A bass rumble that must be Masar. Masar the Jeveni. Masar with the buyer. The buyer who wants to hide her. Jun casts a line into the ship’s cockpit, and hears—

“—known a lot of casters. My friend Woon used to talk about Sunstep like she’s a fucking miracle worker.” The remark meets with Liis’s implacable silence. Apparently undeterred, Masar asks, “Is it true she wrote her Hood program when she was fifteen?” He whistles low. “Fuck. That’s almost impressive enough to make up for her being such an asshole.”

“She’s not an asshole,” mutters Liis. Adds, “Not in a bad way. A little single-minded sometimes, but—”

Masar huffs. “You think I’m not used to having people reject an idea just because it comes from a Jeveni? She clearly doesn’t think we’re capable of protecting you.”

Jun’s body tightens. Liis says, “It’s not about the Jeveni. It’s about the idea of hiding itself.”

For a moment Jun thinks she’s going to say more, just spill Jun’s secrets on the cabin floor, but to her relief, Liis goes silent again.

Finally, doubtfully, Masar says, “Well, at least she’s not all or nothing, like you. She’s still willing to work with me. You should talk to my buyer. He’ll change her mind about the protection, I swear it.”

“He won’t change her mind.”

“Then you change her mind. You aren’t opposed to our help. She’ll listen to you.”

“I don’t want this deal at all. I don’t work with strangers.”

Masar grumbles, “She must have been a stranger to you once. You don’t know her from the womb.”

Liis says nothing, and this time a smile twitches at Jun’s mouth. He’s got her there. The first time Liis saved her life, they were very much strangers. Jun had seriously misjudged a con she was running in a casting lab, pilfering credit off three Teron blockheads who turned out to be savvier than she anticipated. They cornered her in an alley behind the lab, and as the second and third blows landed, Jun finally realized she had made a miscalculation. She supposes they would have killed her if not for the sudden arrival of a stocky, ferocious hurricane of a woman who left them all unconscious in the muck and took Jun with her. Patched her up in a tiny dark room cluttered with spices and weapons and books of poetry.

As introductions go, it was memorable. And quite outside Liis’s usual wheelhouse.

But Liis didn’t open up to her right away, didn’t want to work with her, didn’t trust her. It took months of “accidental” run-ins and gifts of information and occasional, blistering sex before Jun persuaded her to partner up on a job. Since then, they have only ever worked with well-established contacts, people Jun knows from the casting net or Liis knows from her years of surviving under the radar. When Masar offered protection on behalf of his buyer, and Liis seemed open to it, Jun was frankly shocked. But what can it mean, except that Liis doesn’t think they can protect themselves? Not this time.

Masar says, “I think you know you can trust us.” Liis doesn’t respond, and if he was wrong, she would say so. Which means she does believe they can trust the Jeveni. But she won’t say it outright, and in her silence Masar blusters on, “I saved Jun’s life. Twice. I mean, Som’s ass. I’m pretty good with this shotgun, and I’ve got a hundred pounds on both of you. Don’t you think if I’d wanted to take you two out, I would have done it by now?”

Liis drawls, “Congratulations on having a big gun, but please believe me when I say that killing you would be about as easy for me as picking the wings off a fly.”

Jun smirks. There is something so obnoxiously attractive about Liis’s moments of arrogance and swagger. Moments when the cloaksaan in her shows its deadly face.

But that word—cloaksaan—triggers an internal flinch. It pulls Jun back in time, into memories she can never control. Sometimes she’ll see a dark shape in a doorway, or a dark coat on a stranger, and find herself returned to the academy library in Riin Kala, the Six Gods painting the ceiling overhead. Her alarm going off. Monsters in the foyer. She remembers the head archivist, flanked by cloaksaan, calling her name—but Ricari’s warning had already come, and Jun was already out of the room. She found a window. Shimmied down an escape ladder onto the alley floor, catching her calf on a ragged piece of metal during the descent. Wet blood ran down her leg. She made it to the safe house, panting and faint. It was only a twelve-by-twelve flat squeezed between a hundred others in the slum town of Barter Street, half a mile from the academy. She did her best to clean the wound and seal it with suture gel, sobbing and shaking the entire time. She kept the lights off in the flat so no one would notice her arrival.

And then, she passed out.

Over the cast, Masar says, “It’s Jun’s coin to barter. When she wakes up, I’m taking my lead from her.” Liis doesn’t reply. Suddenly petulant, he adds, “My buyer will change your minds. Give them a chance to change your minds.”

Liis says, low and emotionless, “Jun would rather Esek kill us than have to hide.”

Jun’s stomach twists at the words, a combination of dread and guilt, and that uncanny feeling she still gets sometimes, when Liis proves how well she knows her. Especially the wretched parts of her.

This time, Masar doesn’t have a retort, and the air goes dead. Jun cuts the casting line. She lies staring at the bulkhead, listening to the low hum of the ship. A moment later, the door to the cabin opens. Jun closes her eyes, feigns sleep, doesn’t want to talk right now—

The door closes with a definitive hiss. “I know you’re faking.”

Fucking former cloaksaan.

Jun sits up. Liis watches her solemnly. She looks tired and worried and it pricks Jun with regret over all she’s put her through in the past week. Liis says, “You look like shit.”

Such a romantic.

“You should probably have more painkillers.” Liis brandishes one of the morpho syrettes.

Jun notices she’s holding it in her right hand rather than her left; she’s got her left arm subtly cradled against her side—a sure indication it’s sore.

“Sure you don’t need that yourself?” she asks.

“I’m fine.”

“Let me look at your arm.”

Liis scowls. “I’ve got to shower. Here.”

She tosses the syrette across the bed, and Jun manages to catch it, though not without wincing. She watches Liis go into the bathroom and shut the door. The shower turns on. Jun uncaps the syrette and jabs it into her own neck, gritting her teeth through the initial pain, and then collapsing back against the mattress as floaty relief takes its place. For a moment, all she can feel is drugged and grateful. But that blessing turns on her, becomes like a key unlocking all her mental defenses…

Run. Run. Run.

That word in her mind is like a fishhook, dragging her back through the waters of time. She remembers Ricari, his voice, his hands, his lined and weary face.

Always have an escape plan. Have two, he said before she left K-5 to start school on Ma’kess.

If you get the signal, don’t question it. Just go.

Keep this gun clean. Keep it on you at all times.

Go to the safe house. Stay there until I can come and get you. If I can’t, I’ll send word.

The old memories pull her under, like the vacuum of space, like an ocean of code. The fact is, she did everything he told her to do. She kept her gun clean and she made her contingencies and she listened when his warning came. She went to the safe house and waited. And she still nearly died. Later she would realize the wound in her leg became infected right away, that bit of rusty escape ladder introducing a hundred years of city grime directly into her veins. She spent two days in a fever fugue. The flat was stocked with water pouches and dried mealpacks and even antibiotics, but she got sick so quickly she didn’t touch any of it, and she was too frightened and too delirious to seek help. How sepsis didn’t get her is a miracle—

Except it’s not a miracle at all. Because the next time she was truly conscious, she realized someone else was sitting in the room. And it wasn’t Great Gra.

A cloaksaan, she thought, but was too weak and miserable to care. Distantly, she noticed an IV in her arm, connected to a bag of some liquid that hung from the bedpost. Was the cloaksaan poisoning her? Weren’t they famous for doing cruel, creepy shit like that?

“Good,” said a voice, very quiet and calm, as she had always imagined cloaksaan sounded. “Your fever broke an hour ago.”

Jun realized her leg no longer felt like it was on fire. In fact, she had the sense it had been wrapped properly, though she couldn’t quite sit up and look. She blinked—her vision was fuzzy. The figure in the chair was half-shadowed, but she could tell after a moment that they were not wearing the black uniform of a cloaksaan. There was no pauldron with its three-pointed Kindom star against a blazing sun. There was no bloodletter at their waist. Jun tried to talk but her mouth was too dry. The figure gestured at something.

“Drink that.”

Only then did she realize there was a water pouch on her chest. She tore the foil corner with weak, trembling fingers, and began to suck desperately, guzzling, and then squeezing out every last drop until the pouch fell from her hands and she was panting from exhaustion.

“I admit,” said the person in the chair, “I did not expect you to escape. The Cloaksaan must be very embarrassed.”

They had a strange voice, a strange accent, that reminded her of a game of tiles. They spoke each word like it was a game piece they were delicately placing on a table, one after the other, in a perfect line. Their face was still shrouded, but Jun had an impression of them as tall and lean. Their head, she thought, was shaved. Their hands, resting on their knees, were gloved.

“Who are you?” Jun croaked.

“A friend of your Great Gra.”

Jun stared. She was better trained than to take them at their word.

“What’s your name?” she asked, with a haughtiness that might not have been smart.

“It is not safe for me to give you a name.”

“Then how do I know you’re Gra’s friend?”

“Because I knew I could find you here. He has had this safe house since before you or I were born.”

Jun knew this was pretty airtight, but she was unwilling to concede it. “I don’t know who you are. Gra told me to come here and wait for him.”

“I know,” said the figure in the chair. “But he could not come.”

Fear pooled in Jun’s stomach. It dried out her mouth again, as if she’d never tasted the water. Her fingers twitched. But she forced herself to ask the question they had clearly come to answer. “Where is he?”

Then the stranger told her a story that would take her hours to understand. Maybe years. They described a confrontation in the family shop. A cleric called Esek Nightfoot, who shot her uncle Coz in the head. The stranger explained that two other members of her family had been killed. Her second uncle, Misek, and Ricari. Jun’s own parents had died when she was very young. She remembers them with a fuzzy tenderness, but at heart, she was Ricari’s child.

“My cousins—what—what about my cousins? What about Bene?”

Her voice was raw. She wasn’t crying because the adrenaline of disbelief had choked out all other bodily responses. She wanted to sit up, jump up, scream—but she couldn’t move.

The stranger said, “Alive. As are your grandmothers, and your aunt.”

Jun had never been particularly close to these women. Knowing they were alive brought her relief, but it didn’t even nick the shell of grief growing over her now. Her cousins were safe—that was the most important thing. She thought of Bene. He had the same dark wheat eyes as Ricari. He was just a sweet and good-natured kid, always following her around, always wanting to be her. And now his father was dead…

“Was it because of Gra?” she asked, thinking maybe if she asked questions, if she kept talking, she could hold the wall of horror and grief at bay a little longer. “Was it because he used to speak against the Kindom?”

Granted, that was over fifty years ago, when Gra was a young man living in Riin Kala and heading up protests against cloaksaan terrorization and corrupt secretaries. Maybe they decided to finally make an example of him? Maybe they—

“This had nothing to do with Ricari’s political past. This was the action of a single cleric, working outside the purview of the Kindom.”

Jun was too stunned to speak.

The stranger went on, “Cleric Nightfoot’s true purpose is to protect the interests of her family. She will kill anyone if it helps her to get what she wants.”

Jun blurted, “But that’s wrong!”

Instantly, she flushed in humiliation, realizing how absurd, how naive she sounded. The stranger was silent, a silence Jun couldn’t read. Was it an indictment of her foolishness? Was it agreement? Was it simply indifference to the outburst of a child? Jun’s eyes burned suddenly with unshed tears, first of embarrassment, and then, an all-consuming rage. The kind that burrows and takes root and spreads its filaments through every vein and nerve, till it becomes an underlying code that will dictate everything that comes next. Her tears went away. A dark resolve descended.

“We have money. Ricari put away enough to start over.” She nodded, feeling the beginnings of a plan. “We can relocate. The frontier stations in Teros System are completely off the grid. We’ll go there. I’m a caster—I can make all of us new identities, and so long as we lie low for a few—”

“The money is all gone,” interrupted the stranger. “The Kindom seized your family assets. They have put out statements that the Ironways are a terrorist cell. That you slaughtered a contingent of novitiates. Your family’s names and faces are all over the Treble now. I have had to separate them into two groups and place them with protectors.”

Jun’s heart and stomach dropped out of her body.

“Protectors?” she whispered. Her fingers were cold. Her limbs were numb.

“People I trust,” they said, and said no more.

Jun swallowed over and over. She flexed her fingers, trying to get feeling back into them.

“For how long?” she asked.

They said nothing. This was an answer. Jun’s ears started to ring. Even in the darkness of the room, her vision went white.

The stranger said, “I promised your grandmi I would bring you to her, if you lived. You will not be well enough to travel until tomorrow at the earliest.”

Those words managed to break through her descending panic. Sharply she said, “No!”

As before, the person in the chair was silent, and as before, Jun heard the sheer ridiculousness of her words. What other option did she have? Where could she go that this Esek Nightfoot wouldn’t find her? She had nothing. She was fourteen. She was wanted in the Treble. Her grandmothers must be desperate to get her back, and she was desperate to hold her little cousins and know they were safe.

But they weren’t safe. They were destitute. Dependent on protectors they didn’t know. Separated from one another, probably forever. That would kill Hosek, who cared about nothing but her family. And what about Jun’s cousins? They would grow up in hiding. Bene always wanted to go to the academy, like her. But that would never happen now. Isolation. Exile. They would never have anything that was their own. They would never even have freedom. Refugees. Outcasts.

No. No. Jun couldn’t stand it. Wouldn’t allow it. With all the fever and ferocity of youth, she set her fate in that moment.

“Take me somewhere else.”

After a pause, the stranger said, “Nowhere else is safe.”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to disappear down a hole. I’ll go out on my own. I’ll survive on my own, until I have money. Until I can make us free again.”

Another pregnant silence.

“If I let you do that, I will be breaking my word to your family. To Ricari.”

She had a sense then that the stranger was angry. Or at least, feeling something very strongly. Were they angry at her? Somehow, she didn’t think so. She took a gamble.

“Would you let yourself be carted off like this? If someone killed your family, would you run away and hide forever?”

A long, stifling pause. Then, the stranger let out a breath, which was the most human thing they had done so far. They leaned forward. Their face came out of the shadows. The first thing Jun noticed was their Katish gendermark. It was very pale, as of someone who did not want to be gendered from a distance. It was a slightly taboo assignation, one Jun had only seen once or twice. The rest of the stranger’s face was ordinary. But the dark eyes were so intense that Jun shrank back.

“I cannot be your protector. I cannot take you as an apprentice. If I do not deliver you to your family, I will have to abandon you somewhere. You will probably be found. You will probably be killed. You may be tortured first.”

Jun fought to control her expression. She felt cold and sweaty with fear.

“If you accept those odds, then I will take you wherever you want to go. I will give you what I can. But after that, I will have to forget you. You may not survive. Indeed, to survive, you will have to be… extraordinary.” They paused on the word. It was like a door coaxing Jun to step through. “Do you understand, Jun Ironway? Is it truly what you want?”

In that moment, Jun’s future split into two paths. The stranger was letting her choose, and whatever choice she made, it would be her responsibility alone. This was both an act of deepest respect, and utmost cruelty. Years later, Jun wonders what would have happened if the stranger had responded to their encounter differently. What if they had treated her words as the bravado of a grief-stricken teenager? What if they had been patient, and won her over slowly to the more rational decision? What if—

“Jun?”

She looks up to find Liis standing next to her. She didn’t even hear the shower go off, much less the door opening. Liis is looking at her with a furrowed brow. She’s wearing loose shorts and a bandeau around her breasts. A long, thick scar wends down her rib cage, carving a tract through blue-black skin.

“Are you all right?”

Jun blinks, as if blinking were a switch that could flick her from one time back to the present. Slowly, cautious of her still aching body, she puts her legs over the side of the bed and stands up. Liis watches her. Jun tests out the strength in her legs, walking to the bathroom to get a drink from the tap. To her surprise, she’s not dizzy at all.

It’s when she turns back, looking at Liis across the room, that she asks quietly, “Do you think I was wrong, to never make contact with them?”

Liis thinks about it for several moments. “Knowing where they are, knowing they’re safe, is the most important thing. Making contact before we were ready could have put them at risk.”

Jun smiles, but it’s pained. Before they were ready… They’ve had this conversation before. It took her five years to find her grandmothers and Bene in a small mining town on the coast of N’braekos, Braemin; two more to learn her aunt had died of fever on a farm station orbiting Quietus, but was survived by Jun’s younger cousins, the twins. Yes, they are safe. Trapped in poor communities with no way out, but safe. Bringing them together again, accruing enough fortune to keep them close and protect them—that motivation has driven her hardest. For years, nothing else mattered to her. Then she met Liis, and things were different after that. Liis signed on to her mission. Liis gave her partnership and watched her back. Liis brought trust into her life. Liis is powerfully strong, and achingly brave—and so much smarter than Jun.

Which reminds her.

“How did you know Masar was a Jeveni?”

Liis rubs the back of her neck with her right hand, like she’s debating whether to answer. Then she gestures at her face. “The Braemish tattoos. They don’t cover the spot where the Jeveni tattoo should be. That spot is smooth.”

Jun rolls her eyes. “You cloaksaan freak.”

“Also… he speaks Je. You may have taken that news in stride, but the fact is it’s nearly impossible for non-natives to learn Je. It’s composed almost entirely of tonal variation and idioms. The acrobat said, ‘Wide tunnels in our rock. Kill the oxygen snatchers.’”

“What the fuck?” says Jun.

“But Masar translated it as, ‘Autonomy for Jeve. Death to thieves.’”

“My own ocular did the same,” Jun argues.

“That’s because your language translator is more sophisticated than anything a Braemish pirate would have had on his own ocular. Because your translator was programmed by you. You caster freak.”

“Well, if you’re so smart, tell me: Why shouldn’t we sell this coin to the people who have more right than anyone to know what the Nightfoots did?”

Liis glowers. “Is this your play? We’re risking our lives to work with the Jeveni out of a sense of justice? In that case, why don’t we just give it to them and be done with it?”

“Well, let’s not be rash—”

“Haven’t I kept you alive all these years? How do you think I did that?”

“I like to think we’ve kept each other alive, thanks,” Jun shoots back. “And we have taken plenty of risks to get what we want. Everything we do is a risk. Maybe we haven’t been this exposed before, but—”

“Fine,” Liis snaps. “Then sell it to them. And let them pay us in a currency we can use.”

Jun closes her mouth. This impasse, again. Liis watches with troubled eyes. Jun thinks of the dark eyes of the stranger in Great Gra’s safe house. She thinks about Bene’s dark wheat eyes, full of terror as Esek’s novitiates killed his father. She thinks of Bene, forced into hiding—

“Everything I’ve done has been so we can get to the frontier stations. So that we don’t have to hide. How can you ask me to—”

“You think it’s weakness,” Liis interrupts. She moves toward Jun, till they are standing in front of each other, of a height but otherwise opposites—Liis muscular and compact, dark-skinned and dark-eyed; Jun skinny and pale brown and so much less remarkable. “You know that’s all I’ve been doing for ten years, right? Hiding from the Cloaksaan. Hiding from that life. Do you think I’m weak, Jun?”

Jun’s stomach churns with acid. Angrily she reminds her, “I’ve never called you that.”

“And yet if I’m not weak for hiding, why would you be weak for—”

“Because I had that chance,” Jun snaps. “I had the chance to hide away with my family, and I said no. If I do it now, then all this time was for nothing. I might as well have gone with them in the beginning! Instead, I broke my own heart to try to find a better way. And for what? So the Jeveni can put me in a hovel somewhere?”

Liis sighs. “So, it’s this again? You still blame yourself.”

“I—”

“You were a child. You made a decision. None of them died because of you. You have to forgive yourself. And you have to look past your fear and your stubbornness and do what’s needed. That is survival, Jun. And you don’t need me to tell you so.”

She walks away. Jun watches, silent. She eats up the sight of her: her short wrestler’s legs and her strong shoulders and her stomach cut with muscle and scars. A body wrought from survival, and regret.

Sitting on the bed, Liis uncaps the jar of oil she uses at night. It’s a plant-based medicine from the Katish village where Liis was born. It’s the green smell that suffuses her. She slowly rubs it into her knee joints, then the elbow and wrist of her right arm. Her left arm, seamed below the bicep, is pulled against her body in a posture that might look defensive to someone else, but which Jun recognizes as pain.

“Is it hurting?” Jun asks. “Why have you still got it on? Give it to me.”

Liis does nothing for long seconds. Then she sets the jar of oil down. With a practiced movement of her right hand, she disconnects the arm at the bio port; there’s a sucking sound, and a click. Jun holds out her hand for it, and Liis passes it over with a mutter of annoyance. The arm is soft and warm in Jun’s hands, with a supple give of muscle and flesh under skin perfectly matched to Liis’s. Jun finds Liis’s backpack next to the bed and pulls out the supplies pouch. She goes to the room’s small table and turns on the lamp. Sitting down, she rolls out the pouch of tools and holds the arm under the light. She uses a tip of live wire to test the reaction in each fingertip, as well as the crook of the elbow. She sprays a disinfectant into the connector and carefully examines the interior under penlight. Several ports emerge from behind a thin membrane, behind which the muscle and fat and bone of Liis’s cybernetic arm regulate their own blood flow and nervous system.

“I’m going to clean these plugs,” she says without looking up. “And you need a new connector for the brachial artery.”

Liis doesn’t answer. Jun sets to work, methodical in her treatment of the arm. Not for the first time she feels a shiver of anger, that Liis must make do with a prosthetic. A very high-end prosthetic, yes, but a prosthetic, nonetheless. It requires lots of maintenance. It’s more painful. It squeaks sometimes in a way she knows makes Liis’s skin crawl. But she lives with it, because the upgrades are so expensive.

“I want to buy you a body mod,” Jun says.

Liis narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“I want you to have a real arm. Something that won’t hurt like this. If we go into hiding, we won’t have access to high-end medical. You’ll never get the arm.”

Finally Liis answers, her voice flat but not cold, “I won’t get one if I’m dead, either.”

“Godsdamnit, Liis. Work with me here!”

“I will work with you,” Liis retorts. “I’ll go meet this buyer.” But before Jun can get excited, she adds sharply, “If you agree to hear their whole offer.” Jun grimaces. “Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”

They stare each other down for long moments. This is the nature of their partnership. Negotiation and argument, compromise and devotion.

Blinking rapidly, embarrassed by the sudden burn of tears in her eyes, she focuses on the prosthetic arm. She uses a disinfectant swab to carefully oil the valves. Then, she injects a needle into its median vein, extracts a sample onto a slide, and examines it under her magnifier.

“I want to get you a new sleeve cap. It’ll help with the chafing. And I’m putting this in the regenerator for the night. The platelet count is low.”

“Fine,” Liis mutters.

“Fine,” Jun retorts.

Jun slips the arm into its regenerator sleeve. She goes to Liis and gently fits the cap onto her exposed upper arm, checking for hints of inflammation first. For all its muscle and scars, Liis’s skin is always unexpectedly soft. Jun can smell the clean green warmth of her, and she wants to bury her face in that warmth. To be delivered of all her cares. For a little while.

Instead she asks, “Are you still in pain?”

“No,” Liis says. She’s such a liar.

“If we agree to hide, I may never see my family again.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything until we talk to them.”

Jun nods. Two years ago, Grandmi Keena, Hosek’s wife, died of a treatable illness. How much longer before Hosek is dead, too? Bene works a dangerous job in the copper mines. The twins are scraping by on a farm station with bad air filtration. Every day, Jun feels that she is running out of time, running out of chances. And now she must face an even worse possibility—

“If we don’t hide, I may lead Esek right to them.”

Liis has the generosity not to jump on this. She is quiet, letting Jun feel the unwelcome truth.

Jun recalls the day she boarded a freighter in the wake of the stranger’s purposeful step, and disembarked on Kator, in a factory town in north Dunta. Carrion birds wheeled overhead and plumes of smoke smudged a pale skyline with purple and black, and Jun had nothing to her name but a small bag and a credit coin with five thousand plae on it. The stranger looked at her one last time, and gave her a final chance to go with them. To be returned to her family. But she didn’t take that chance. The stranger, half annoyed, half impressed, had said, “You will be on your own. That is safest, for now. But not everyone can bear it. If you decide you want something different, find outsiders, like yourself. Casters, criminals—the Treble’s rejected ones. Be smart. Learn to run. Learn to fight. Learn who to trust.”

So she had. But ever since that day Jun has wondered if she was wrong—stubborn and foolish and rash. She has wondered if she is, herself, fundamentally wrong, somehow.

Only Liis has ever quelled that fear.

Jun shyly touches one of the twists of Liis’s hair. “I’ll listen to their offer… their whole offer.” Liis’s eyes glint with cautious satisfaction, and it would be irritating if she didn’t look so beautiful right now. So incongruously vulnerable. Jun runs a thumb across her eyebrow, adding cautiously, “I was thinking that… maybe… you should let me go with Masar on my own. You know, lie low, just until I—”

Suddenly, there is an arm winding around her waist. She finds herself pulled forward, pulled close, onto the bed, knees either side of Liis’s hips. She makes an oofing sound, tries to balance—and stops. She can feel the hardness under Liis’s shorts, the straps on her thighs and across her hips. A white-hot bolt of hunger goes through Jun, even as she tries to right herself in the face of this… unexpected turn. When did Liis even put it on?

“Really?” she asks.

Liis looks up at her with solemn eyes, lips parted, arm tightening around her. She nudges her hips upward and Jun groans. Liis runs a thumb over the injection site on Jun’s hip.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

To be honest, everything hurts. But she doesn’t give a shit. Liis is the feeling of home. Her shoulders flex when Jun rests her hands on them; she tips her head back to look at Jun, exposing the column of her throat like an offering. Jun puts her mouth on her burn-scarred jaw, biting possessively, and Liis’s whole composed, powerful body shudders.

They’re economical, removing only what they have to, and careful with each other. They use the oil from Liis’s jar, a bloom of life between them. When Jun finally sinks down, it punches a moan out of them both. Jun shivers and holds still, staring Liis in the eyes and unable to speak. Not needing to speak—a silence that brings reprieve. Then, they’re moving. Steady, strong; a bright tension strung between them. Liis slides a hand up into Jun’s hair, fingers tightening, and when they kiss, it’s with rabid hunger. Their mouths shift and press and slide, molten.

Long, exquisite minutes get eaten up in the push and pull, and Jun—Jun has never found anything, in all the systems, as perfect as this. Yes, she’ll plan. Yes, she’ll scheme—but not without Liis. Nothing, without Liis. Her eyes slip shut, and the hand in her hair tightens.

“Look at me,” Liis breathes. “Look at me.”

She opens her eyes, obeying. Her fingers dig into Liis’s back, nails pricking as their pace increases, as their breathing deepens. Her shoulder hurts, her hip throbs, but the burn of it only makes every other sensation sharper, deeper. Sweat breaks out across her skin, pooling at the small of her back and between her shoulder blades. She watches the same bead across Liis’s collarbones and hairline and breasts.

“Let’s lie down,” Jun gasps, wanting to give more.

Liis growls, “No. You first.”

That offer, that permission, spears through her. She moves faster. Liis’s hand releases her hair to grab her hip, and then her ass, urging her on. Jun darts a hand between her own legs, moving frantically, and everything sharpens inside her. It gathers, and gathers—and breaks—flinging her headlong into shuddering, clenching pleasure. She shouts, burying her face against Liis’s neck, overwhelmed by the low sounds of encouragement in her ear. They carry her all the way through, until finally Liis falls back on the bed, Jun collapsing on top of her.

“You think I’m letting you out of my sight now?” Liis says breathlessly. “I’ve got your back forever.”

The sound Jun makes is a laugh and sob together, and as the last tendrils curl through her, she uses her arms and legs to grip Liis as tight as she can, as tight as she’s ever gripped anything, in all the years since she fled Riin Kala under a stranger’s wing.