By midday, I finally digest the fact that Volga is not coming. A loneliness settles in me. Not a pang, to which I’m accustomed, but the deep loneliness of knowing that this is it. This is the bottom. A two-bag life for one. The end of a friendship, set to the sound of the droning holoNews and the slam of a door. My newest vodka litchi seems suddenly very tasteless. The gravity in the cabin eerily absent. When booking, I had asked the captain to put on null grav for the preflight. I did that for Volga. It was something she missed from our first flight from Earth to Luna. No point to it now. I’ve always hated the feeling of space. I ask the stewardess to kill the null grav and tell her that I’m ready to depart. Ms. Bjorl isn’t coming.
I head to the lavatory to relieve myself before the main engine ignition. I take antinausea medication and am about to go back to the lounge when I remember I should alter my destination now that Volga isn’t coming, in case her conscience gets the better of her and she goes to the authorities. Goodbye, Africa; hello, Echo City. I climb the stairs to the flight deck. It’s empty. Quiet. The flight crew that had been preparing me a meal in the kitchen is gone. I check their small bunkrooms. Nothing. This isn’t good. I creep past the kitchen toward the cockpit and peer inside. The pilots are gone too. Nothing seems amiss out the cockpit viewports. The landing pad is deserted and it’s clear sky beyond that. Still, something is wrong. I pull my snub-nosed pistol from under my armpit.
Have the Syndicate come back to finish me after all?
I move through the hall. The gun is slippery in my sweaty palms. I clear the top level and look down the flight of stairs, listening for movement. Hearing nothing, I creep down the stairs.
In the lounge I hear something. Voices. Volga? I burst into the lounge with my pistol out in front to find two women staring at me from the leather flight chairs. “Holiday…” The word sticks in my throat like a shattered chicken bone. She sits with her elbows on her knees, in civi clothes. Black pants, boots, and a hunter-green leather jacket that looks like it’s got some sort of concealed pulseShield generator sewn into the fabric of the left sleeve. A heavy railgun pistol is strapped into the holster on her right thigh. Woman is ready for urban warfare. And at her side, in new clothes and freshly washed hair, sits the rabbit, with blinding hate in her rusty eyes. Her arm’s in a sling. “Ah. Shit…”
“Sit down, Ephraim,” Holiday says.
I keep the gun on them and look down the hall for others they might have brought with them. They seem alone, but there’s likely a squad of lurcher commandos waiting just inside the terminal. It’s over. I laugh bitterly and point a finger at Lyria. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“That’d be easier for you, wouldn’t it?”
“How did you get past the Obsidians?”
She makes a face at me. “Magic.”
I grunt. “How did you find me?”
“We are the State,” Holiday says. “How long did you think you could hide?”
“Longer than a day,” I admit. “Do you mind if I make myself a drink? Or four?” I ease toward the wet bar.
“Shut up and sit down.”
I frown and look at my pistol. “I’m the one with the gun.”
“I’m the one with a Stained in the cargo hold.”
“Talk about overkill.” I slump into the seat across from hers. I’m surprised to notice that I don’t feel defeat or fear. If anything, I feel relief. I engage the safety and put my gun on the table between us, pushing it toward Lyria.
“You’ll probably want to use that.”
“Already got one,” she says, pulling my Omnivore from her jacket and setting it on her knee. There’s a fingerlock around the trigger. I smile in seeing it again.
“Escaped the Obsidians. Somehow prevented yourself from being skinned alive by Republic Intelligence. Now sitting here with a gun. Must be magic.”
“Ephraim…” Lyria starts.
“Call me Philippe, if that makes you more comfortable.”
“Slag you.”
“Original.” I lean back and cross my legs. “So, what happens now? Commandos burst in and drag me to an interrogation tank? Peel off parts of me to give to the Reaper when he gets home? Or will it be chemical torture? Experiential? Lock me in a holoimmersion for a relative century? Or do I have a one-way subaquatic ticket to Deepgrave?”
“This is the part where you tell us where the children are,” Holiday says. “Then you tell us who you sold them to. What you know about the Pink with the cane. And how we can get them back. For your sake, I hope you know enough to spare yourself being booked for treason.”
“Fortunately, capital punishment is no longer an option,” I say.
“We might make an exception.”
“How noble.”
She leans forward. “You’re gonna have to get used to the idea that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cell, Ephraim. How big that cell is depends on what you tell me.”
“Holiday, you’ve spent too much time in the military. You can’t go at a man like that. Give him no means of escape. No incentive. Remember the Eleventh Legion? You were there. The Golden Basilisks.” She remembers. “What happens if you surround an enemy force with no path of surrender or retreat? They fight to the death. And that’s not good for anyone. Trapped by that dam, weren’t they? Do you remember how we just kept firing into them? Eight hours to kill fifty thousand men because we didn’t want to break the dam with bombs. Who knew it could take so long? I never saw the Reaper’s face after that. But you must have. Did he like it?”
“This isn’t a game, Ephraim,” she says. “If you hate life so much you want to die, then be my guest. I’ll give you the bullet to eat. But don’t take two innocent kids with you.”
“Innocent? Everyone keeps throwing that shit around. Their parents put them on the board. They didn’t have to attend functions of state. They didn’t have to parade them around like the paragons of progress. But they did. They made them the targets, not me. How many little kids do you think died in the Battle of Luna? I saw whole blocks disintegrated by Valii-Rath particle beams. Schools turned to dust by termite munitions with Republic stamps on them. Dead kids are the loose change of war. Don’t come whining to me because the man and woman who started this don’t want to pay out of their own pocket like the rest of us.”
I’ve never seen her look at me with so much disgust. “What happened to you?”
“Life. Same shit that happens to everyone else.”
“Trigg would spit on you if he could see this.”
“Well, he died on your watch. Not mine.”
Holiday looks blankly at me as if I’ve slapped her across the face.
All the days we met on Trigg’s birthday, that truth hung between us, unspoken like some weapon of mutually assured destruction. And now that I say it, I taste ashes in my mouth. To use Trigg like this, as a weapon, is the ultimate perversion of who he was, what he meant to the both of us. But he followed her everywhere. And she led him to his death for a cause that doesn’t even remember his name. Holiday can’t meet my eyes. But Lyria shakes her head.
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Save the speeches, love. You’re just a little girl who thinks she’s a hero. You don’t know a thing about me.”
“You’re right. I don’t,” she says. “You’ve gone hard to make that clear. But I know my ma died of cancer in the mines. Ate her lungs right up. Pa thought it was his fault. That he couldn’t get her the right meds. Saw it squeeze the life outta him. And by the time we got out of the mines, he was already dead. All he saw—the sky, the world—he hated, because she didn’t get to see it. You think she would have wanted that for the man she loved?”