“They are.” Victra shrugs, which tips her backward. “He’s got his fingers everywhere. One of the
only men too rich to kill, according to Mother.”
“Is he richer than she was? Than you are?”
“Were,” she corrects, shakes her head. “He knew better than that.” There’s a pause. “But maybe.”
My eyes seek the Silver winged-heel icon that is stamped on the greatest of Phobos’s towers, a three-kilometer-long double helix of steel and glass tipped with a silver crescent. How many Gold eyes look on it with jealousy? How many more must he own or bribe to protect him from all the rest?
Perhaps just one. Crucial to the Jackal’s rise was his silent partner. A man who helped him secretly gain control of the media and telecommunications industries. For the longest time I thought that partner was Victra or her mother and he closed the loop in the garden. But it seems the Jackal’s greatest ally is alive and prospering. For now.
“Thirty million people,” I whisper. “Incredible.”
I can feel her eyes on me. “You don’t agree with Sevro’s plan, do you?”
My thumb picks at a wad of pink gum stuck to the rusted bulkhead. Kidnapping Quicksilver will get
us intel and access to vast weapons factories, but Sevro’s play against the economy is more concerning. “Sevro kept the Sons alive. I didn’t. So I’ll follow his lead.”
“Mhm.” She eyes me skeptically. “I wonder when you started believing grit and vision were the same thing.”
“Oy, shitheads” —Sevro squawks over the com unit in my ear— “if you’re done sightseeing or humping or whatever the hell you’re doin’, it’s time to tuck in.”
—
Half an hour later, Victra and I huddle together with the Howlers in one of the helium-3 containers stacked in the back of our transport. We can feel the ship reverberate beyond the container as it links its magnetic coupling to the docks’ ringed surface. Beyond the ship’s hull, Oranges will be floating in mechanized suits, waiting to steer the weightless cargo containers onto magnetic trams that will in turn take them to the cosmosHaulers awaiting the journey to Jupiter. There they will resupply Roque’s fleet in his war effort against Mustang and the Moon Lords.
But before the containers are transported, Copper and Gray inspectors will come to examine them.
They’ll be bribed by our Blues into counting forty-nine containers instead of fifty. Then an Orange bribed by our contact will lose the container we’re in, a common practice for the smuggling of illegal drugs or untaxed goods. He’ll deposit it in a lower-level berth for machine parts, whereupon our Sons contact will meet us and escort us to our safe house. At least, that’s the plan. But for now we wait.
Eventually gravity returns, signaling we’re in the hangar. Our container settles on the floor with a thud. We steady ourselves against helium-3 drums. Voices drift beyond the metal walls of the container. The hauler beeps as it decouples from us and returns out the pulseField to space. Then silence. I don’t like it. My hand twists around the leather grip of my razor inside my jacket sleeve. I take a step forward toward the door. Victra follows. Sevro grabs my shoulder. “We wait for the contact.”
“We don’t even know the man,” I say.
“Dancer vouched for him.” He snaps his fingers at me to return to my place. “We wait.”
I notice the others listening, so I nod and shut my mouth. It’s ten minutes later that we hear a solitary pair of feet click against the deck outside. The lock thuds back on the container doors, and dim light seeps in as they part to reveal a clean-cut, goateed Red with a toothpick in his mouth. Half a head shorter than Sevro, he clicks his eyes over each of us in turn. One eyebrow climbing upward when he sees Ragnar. The other follows when he looks down the muzzle of Sevro’s scorcher.
Somehow he doesn’t step back. Man’s got a spine in him.
“What can never die?” Sevro growls in his best Obsidian accent.
“The fungus under Ares’s sack.” The man smiles and glances over his shoulder. “Mind lowerin’ the
nasty? We gotta move, now. Borrowed this dock from the Syndicate. ’Cept they don’t really know about it, so unless you wanna tangle with some professional uglies, we gotta box the jabber and waddle on.” He claps his hands. “?‘Now’ means now.”
—