If Talon had had his twin with him, then this would have been amazing. He’d heard about trade tangles but he’d never been at one. They were not military functions, after all, and his only life outside of that had been aboard TwiceFar. That station had been its own sort of tangle. But this, this gathering of ships, each with its own unique flavor, was something altogether different.
Dabry had indicated he should stay with Atlanta but hadn’t outright said so, and therefore Talon felt justified in ignoring that. The girl could look after herself.
He went off to collect the supplies on his own list: some flavored oils (“Maybe you’ll have better luck with that than Milly did,” Dabry had grumbled), stellar salts from a Clippit trader, and a variant of laseriabell roots that was supposed to have substantial kick to them. Dabry had given him funds for all three and he knew the last was partially a test of his bargaining power.
Talon also knew very well what it was that Niko and Dabry intended by sending him for supplies. They thought he would be distracted by it all, by the chance to be outside the ship in this elaborate, temporary construction, one of the biggest such he’d ever seen, even if Niko had indicated it was paltry by Free Trade standards.
He drifted through shells and the bubbles of stalls, the walls changing color from time to time to showcase the wares they held. He’d chosen human form, and every time he shifted from one environment to another, he could feel the minute changes in humidity and air composition from ship to ship, even when the air was unbreathable and his breather took over for him.
He’d looked the list over and knew he could find everything on it readily, so readily that he wondered if the mission had not been preplanned for him.
They were babying him, he thought with a flicker of irritation, which was followed by a wave of self-pity—why shouldn’t they pander to him, after all, when it was as though a piece of him had been cut off? The walking wounded, that was him. Capable of movement but little else.
Now he moved aimlessly, letting himself get pulled along by the surges of traffic. He’d been told that if he ran across spices, any he could get would be acceptable with the exception of ship-pepper, which everyone always had in surplus. No one really liked ship-pepper, but it was easy to grow and produced useful byproducts in the process and it was better—though not by much—than no taste at all.
He let himself wander through stalls of the kind he would have been told to stay away from in the past—or rather, he and Thorn would have been told to avoid them. Strange that with Thorn gone, Niko had felt no need to forbid him. Although he didn’t know it, she would have welcomed this touch of rebellion, would have seen it as a sign of healing, and so she had left plenty of potential room for it.
But it wasn’t healing that lay at the heart of him. He was using the stalls to hurt himself, over and over, picking up a weapon and forcing himself to consider how Thorn would have reacted to it, deliberately summoning up the vision of his twin in order to reignite his pain, slice open the healing scar. It was a bruise he kept pressing on, because its healing would have been a loss he was unwilling to contemplate.
Where once he might have been warmed to be trusted with such a test by Niko or Dabry, this time it only annoyed him. They acted as though they understood everything, knew everything, but when push came to shove, they hadn’t been able to save Thorn, and that absence made none of this amazing. Made it all annoying and irritating and tedious.
But he did pause at a stall of puff-jackets, bright and gaudy with purples and greens. Very stylish, and not something you could replicate because of the internal tech, so he and Thorn had always wanted a pair, had been saving up.
He brushed his hand over the slick, cushiony fabric. Not his favorite color, but Thorn’s …
“Hey there,” a voice said behind him. “That device on yer collar—you’re with Niko Larsen’s crew, aren’t you? Forgot the new ship’s name but I recognize that logo. Fancy ship, lad, must be a pleasure to serve on a ship like that.”
For once, he was dealing with someone who didn’t treat him as though he was brittle, made of glass. Someone not being careful of his feelings. He straightened and nodded casually.
“Niko and I are old friends,” the little man said. “I’m Gnarl, of the Knot. Come and drink in honor of your ship.”
Talon hesitated. Even through his naivete, there was something off about the other.
His twin’s face flickered in his mind. “Free booze,” Thorn would have said, and Talon would have followed that without a thought, so he forced anything else away, and followed.
Atlanta stopped at a stall crammed with books and papers. The basket near her, jammed with books, included the infamous volume Skullduggery and Sacred Space Vessels. She debated with herself, but Niko had given her a handful of credits to spend, and after how prominently the book had played in their existence, she wanted to read it. She tucked it under an arm and pressed on.
“Where’s Talon?” she asked the ship after taking on the third of Gio’s packages, a box of spice packets from a vending machine that someone had set up. “Is he done yet?”
“He hasn’t made any purchases yet,” the ship said.
“What? Why? Where is he?”
“I believe the establishment is what is called a bar.”
Talon didn’t know how it had happened. He had been talking with the captain (and how flattering was that, that a captain himself wanted to spend time talking to him?) about one thing and then another.
Now they were drinking together because Gnarl had reasonably suggested that he buy Talon a drink in exchange for passing along a handful of message chits that he said were the latest news, promised to Niko earlier. He’d have to go fetch them, but first they should have that drink.
The nameless bar was small and makeshift, housed in a corner formed by the overlap of two larger spaces, clearly something whose battered plastic panels and stools could (and had been) assembled and reassembled hundreds of times, and the floor was sticky with spilled drinks. Talon thought that it didn’t really deserve a name. His crew would have regarded it with distaste, maybe even confusion. There was no artistry here.
And he didn’t care.
The server offered an extremely limited range of drinks, with no accompanying food to soak them up. But the first drink went down smoother than he’d thought, and then, after a while, Talon found himself telling Gnarl everything, or at least everything that was important: Thorn’s death, and how it had happened.
Gnarl had been sympathetic. Turned out astonishingly enough, that he’d had his own twin, just as close, claimed in a way as untimely and unfair, although he didn’t divulge many of the details.
“Happened long ago,” he said, waving a hand that simultaneously seemed to sweep away the topic and summon more drinks for them both. “Wish it had happened nowadays. Nowadays I’d know better what to do.”
Even though he was feeling the effects of the drink, that couldn’t help but catch Talon’s attention, hard and sharp as a fighting hook. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Gnarl shrugged. “You know…” He leaned in confidingly. “Nowadays there are ways around it. Like clones.”
Talon slumped back, disinterested. “Don’t have the memory core,” he said. “Who can afford that kind of tech?”
Gnarl kept leaning forward, eyes fixed on Talon. His voice was so soft that Talon had to strain to hear it. “No, lad, that doesn’t entirely matter, as long as you have some bit of them genetically.”
Talon frowned.
Gnarl took the frown and returned it as a smile. “The flesh holds its own sort of memory. You can clone flesh without a memory core and still have what you want.”
“But he wouldn’t have any of Thorn’s memories!”
“There is that. But memories were not what your brother was. He was flesh and blood, and you can create that side of him. Give him a new life.”
Talon’s nerves were not too befuddled to not twitch anxiously at the implications. “That’s illegal. Way illegal. So illegal.”
“Aye, and that’s the unfair shame of it all,” Gnarl said in commiseration. “If ye’d had more money, coulda had an imprint of him stored, clone him back, nice and legal-like.”
Talon snorted. “Takes money. Lots of money.” Arpat Takraven levels of money. And cloning was not just expensive, but one of the most regulated technologies in the Known Universe. Clone uprisings, back in the days before people realized the dangers, had caused chaos for almost half a century.
“Yeah,” Gnarl said reflectively. “Though I hear some get so desperate they try it on the cheap. You must have some material left for that.”
“That would be illegal,” Talon said, amusing himself by ticking a claw in and out against his glass and not looking at Gnarl. “And it wouldn’t work. I told you. Without his imprint, it’d just be someone who looked like Thorn. It wouldn’t be him.”
“That’s what they tell you, an’ it’s all propaganda.” Gnarl’s eyes had a faint luminous glow at the back of them, so slight it was difficult to tell in the darkness, making Thorn strain to see them. “All that stuff about the imprint and the soul. Bunch of hooey. What you are is stored at the genetic level, and the reason they don’t tell you that … well, I’m sure you can guess why the powers that be would want to keep that knowledge locked away.”
He signaled for two more drinks, setting one in front of Talon. Talon sipped the liquid, which smelled better than it tasted.
“You just need the equipment,” Gnarl said. “What if I was to offer you that?”
“I don’t have money,” Talon said.
Gnarl spread his hands in an expansive gesture that didn’t seem to match the tightness of his features. “No need tah worry about that. You see, you remind me of myself when I was yer age. Little like looking in the mirror. So I’m reaching back in time to help meself.” He shrugged. “If the debt’s too much for you to bear,” he said offhandedly, “I’m sure we can figure out some small, nominal-like favor somewhere down the line.”
Talon ignored the various voices speaking common sense in the back of his head. Most of them had the same accents as Niko and Dabry, and they hadn’t kept Thorn from being killed, and that surely meant they weren’t worth listening to. No, the only voice worth listening to was his brother’s, and if there was a way to be doing that in reality, rather than tormenting himself by imagining it, well then, that was surely the way to go.
He remembered his conversation with the ship. Surely the ship would be sympathetic. Niko and Dabry would not be, he was sure, and that did give him some pause. But not enough.
“Sometimes it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission,” Gnarl said. He smiled indulgently, as though obviously he would be capable of either, even if Niko wasn’t. “But it’s getting on, and I have duties a-calling. I’ll have to send over those chits, no time to go get them.”
He tapped the table to close out the tab. Talon checked the time and was alarmed by how much had passed. And he’d missed multiple messages from Atlanta. Niko would be furious, particularly since he had no extra spices to show for all his dawdling.
But he chose not to think about all of that after Gnarl was gone. Instead, he sat staring down at the table, turning bits of the conversation over in his head.