“I think so. Yeah.”
The Sovereign stares at me. “You’re certain this was on his cane?”
“Sure. I mean yes. Why? What does it mean?”
She doesn’t answer. Holiday shifts in worry. “Ma’am…”
The Sovereign rises from her chair and walks to the window, where she stands for almost a full minute before speaking. “It’s not a monster, Lyria. It’s a cephalopod. An octopus. It is the symbol of the Syndicate.” She turns back to face us. “The Syndicate has my son.”
Dark fear seeps from her eyes into the room. And for the first time, she does not seem in control, not of this room, not of this world, not of the fate of her own son.
“The Syndicate…” I repeat. Even on Mars we’ve heard of the Syndicate. Reds will pay three years’ wages for them to smuggle their families to Agea or Attica or even Luna. Many never make it.
“It’s a criminal organization, a highly evolved one that ruled the underworld of Luna for years,” the Sovereign explains. “When the Society fell, there was a civil war among them until a new leader bound the survivors together and then purged the rest of the gangs. She’s known as the Queen. The man you saw was likely one of her dukes. In all likelihood, it is the Duke of Hands, her prince of thieves. As far as I know, you’re the only person outside the Syndicate ever to have met him and lived. Your Philippe was likely a thorn.”
“It can’t be them,” Holiday whispers. “They’re just criminals. They wouldn’t dare cross the Sovereign….”
“They wouldn’t have dared against Octavia, no. But they’re not afraid of me. Just like the Vox Populi.” She’s quiet and looks at the door her council went through. “Maybe Victra was right. I invited this. I gave away all my teeth.”
“Damn Victra. The Republic should never be the Society,” Holiday says firmly. “Isn’t that the point of all this?”
“What was it that Lorn once said? ‘Mercy emboldens evil men.’?”
“Why do they want your son?” I ask.
“Leverage…” She has an epiphany but doesn’t share it. “Holiday, we need Theodora to contact Darrow. Call an emergency meeting of the Sovereign Council. Then find me Dancer. I want him in my office in an hour.”
“What about the girl?”
The Sovereign looks down at me. “I will need you to testify. And there will be more questions. For now, my steward will see that you have food and a room.”
Holiday motions me to the door. I’m dismissed. I want to wish the Sovereign well, tell her I’ll be praying for her son. But I doubt the words will be well received. “I hope the gun helps,” I say. “I didn’t think about fingerprints till after. Mind was mud. But maybe some of his are still on there.”
“Gun?” the Sovereign asks, turning around. “What gun?”
Holiday looks as clueless as her master.
“The gun I had when I came to the checkpoint,” I say. “I stole it from Philippe’s car. It’s his.”
The Sovereign wheels on Holiday. “Where are the Watchmen?”
“In holding.”
“Send a team to the checkpoint. Now. Tell them to turn the place upside down.”
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“We weren’t given a gun.”
“I told them it was his.”
“Well, they didn’t tell us,” Holiday says.
The Lionguard teams arrive at the checkpoint by air. We watch via their helmet holoCams as they search the building. They find the pistol stored in a boot bag at the bottom of a Watchman’s locker. “That’s a Vulcan Omnivore,” Holiday says distantly. “They only made one line of them about sixty years back. It’s a collector’s item. Worth tens of thousands. One of them must have nipped it to sell.”
I’m a second behind the Sovereign in noticing the strange tone in Holiday’s voice.
“Running forensics,” one of the Lionguards says over his com. A holo of the gun appears in the center of the Sovereign’s conference table. My fingerprints show up on the barrel, trigger, and hilt. But a second set from larger fingers stands out on the battery pack.
“Filtering through the Index,” Holiday says in a dead pitch. “Match found. Piraeus Insurance company register 741 PCE.” She swallows. “Ephraim ti Horn, claims investigator.” The swarthy face of a man in his thirties appears in the air. His eyes are narrow and mischievous, his mouth pinched in playful derision. He’s much younger than Philippe, his nose smaller and his face thinner.
“Is this your Philippe?” Holiday asks.
“His nose is smaller. His cheeks are different.”
“He might have worn prosthetics.”
I lean forward toward the holo as she plays an interview clip from his personnel file. The man sits with his feet up on his desk, talking to the camera in a bored, Luna lilt. “…it seems the case of the missing Renoir comes down not to the cunning of a cat burglar but to a mere case of bankruptcy due to moral putrescence. This is fraud. Plain. And. Simple. I recommend denying recoupment and throw the fucker in Whitehold.”
“That’s him. That’s the bloodydamn bastard in the flesh.”
Holiday lets out a heavy, wounded sigh.
“Do you know him, Holiday?” the Sovereign asks.
The stocky woman nods and laughs a sad laugh to herself. “You could say so. He’s my brother-in-law.”
IT IS MY LAST DAY on Luna. Still dark cycle, but the sunrise stains the east. I sit watching the fledgling dawn with a glass of vodka from the heated terrace of a hotel suite I’ve rented. Tomorrow Volga and I will take the private shuttle I chartered to Earth, where all enemies of the state go to disappear. Digital monitoring on the old planet hasn’t quite caught up to Luna’s. Mars was an option, but it’s too unstable for my taste. I’ve been drinking since word reached me earlier that one of the Syndicate heavies killed a Red girl near the warehouse. I pour a glass of vodka for the little rabbit. Add a zoladone for myself.
She will have died bloody and scared in an alleyway. Hacked apart by hatchets and blades, just like her family. The ache of it in my chest fades as the zoladone spreads its cool, careless fingers through me.
Over the sprawl of the Mass and the flickering cityscape, I see Hyperion. Beyond her, a faint stain of pink that bleeds into a bruised sky littered with skyhooks and blinking satellites and the vein of starships from the AID that make their way into space.
Soon I’ll be on one of them. Not soon enough.
Lionheart’s killers, Holiday included, will be peeling Hyperion apart.