—
A half day later, after a nap and a sobering plate of Terran noodles, I meet my crew to disburse the funds, though I hardly feel like company, on account of the date. They’re huddled in a booth in an uppity South Promenade bar on the fringe of Old Town, drinking vibrantly colored cocktails. Volga twirls a pink umbrella between massive fingers. The bar itself is located inside the gutted carcass of an old advertising dirigible that someone renovated in an attempt to commercialize irony. Seems to be working despite the wartime rationing. The place buzzes with soldiers, packs of slick, suited Silvers, new-monied Greens and Coppers. All the ones near the right levers to make cash when the free market opened, now surrounded by the gaggles that attend them like brightly plumed vultures. It’s mostly midColors, and there’s been more than a few nervous glances aimed at Volga. The big girl has ordered me something called a Venusian Fury. It’s dark as its namesake, Atalantia au Grimmus, and tastes like licorice and salt. Something in it makes the back of my eyes buzz and my groin swell. “What do you think?” she asks hopefully.
“Tastes like the ass end of the Ash Lord.” I push it away. She looks downcast at the table. In my haze, pity is slow to come, and dull when it does. I hate bars like this.
“You know what the Ash Lord’s ass tastes like?” Cyra asks.
“Look how old he is,” Dano says, taking a break from staring at a beautiful slip of a Pink at the bar, who looks nervously at his nasal piercings. His head is buzzed in popular fashion with Obsidian dragons. “Tinpot’s been around long enough to try everything.” I don’t reply, trying to hold on to the buzz left over from Oslo’s vodka. I’ll need it where I’m going.
“Whose idea was this commercial shithole?” I ask.
“Not mine,” Dano says, holding up his hands. “Not nearly enough bare tits in this place.”
“It was mine,” Cyra says defensively. “It was featured in Hyperion Weekly. You know, Eph, it is humanly possible to enjoy something different. Something new.”
“?‘New’ generally means someone’s just trying to make money off something old.”
“Whatever. It’s better than the black-hole dives you visit to pickle your liver. Least here I’m not worried about getting an infection just by walking in the door.”
“Let’s get this over with.” I pull up my datapad so they can all see, and transfer the funds into each of their accounts. Sure, they’d see the balances change on their own pads if I’d just done it over the net. But there’s something incredibly human and satisfying for them to see my thumb disburse the money. “All done,” I say. “Six hundred apiece.”
“Even for Limey?” Dano asks. “Thought she was getting half.”
“What the hell does it matter to you?” Cyra snaps.
“The rest of us did our jobs without a bloody hitch.” He goes back to looking at the Pink girl, who’s talking with her friends. “No reason we shouldn’t get a little bonus for that action.”
“I need no bonus,” Volga says.
Dano sighs. “You ain’t helping the cause, love.”
“What the shit is your damage?” Cyra glares at Dano past Volga between them. “Always jacking on about my business? Why don’t you tend your own and focus on catching diseases from Pink slips.”
I lurch to my feet. “All right, this was fun. Try not to catch anything.”
“And he’s out like a Drachenj?ger.” Dano checks his newest shiny chronometer. This one has rubies embedded in the hands. “Two minutes flat.”
“When’s the next job?” Cyra asks.
“Yeah, boss,” Dano says. “When’s the next job? Cyra’s got bills to pay.”
She flips him the crux and stares at me with more desperation than she probably means to show. It’s pitiful. “So? Your man’s got another job, right?”
“Not this time. We’re all done.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.” Seeing rain slithering down the windows, I pop the collar of my jacket.
“Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “You just arrived. Stay for a drink. We can order you something else?” She stares up at me with those big mopey eyes, and for a moment I consider it, until I hear a telltale hush of the patrons and turn to see two towering figures emerge from outside through the dirigible’s metal door. Golds. They wear black jackets with legion epaulets, their shoulders eclipsing the heads of the other patrons. They blithely survey the room with entitled eyes, before one of them catches sight of Dano’s Pink and strides to the bar. The others make room and he introduces himself without a care in the world. There’s an iron griffin pin on his chest. Arcos spawn. Dano’s eyes go down as the Gold’s hand drifts to the Pink’s waist.
“Boss…” Dano says, eyeing me warily.
I realize my hand has drifted to the butt of the pistol under my jacket.
Bloodydamn Aureate. We should have purged the lot of them, or exiled them to the Core. But that chance is gone. All for the war effort.
“Just one drink, Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “It will be fun. We can tell each other stories. And share jokes, as friends do.”
“It’s always the same story!”
As I leave the dirigible in the gravLift, the warm laughter of one of the Gold youths chases me down into the night.
THE BAKING SAND WARMS MY FEET. They’re smaller than I remember. Paler. And the gulls that careen overhead much larger, much fiercer as they spin and dive into the water of a sea so blue I cannot tell where ocean ends and sky begins. Gentle waves call to me. I’ve been here before, but I cannot remember when or how I came to be on this beach.
A man and woman are in the distance, their feet leaving slender paths that the waves, in time, slowly devour, step by step, then all at once till they are gone as if they were never there. I call to them. They begin to turn, but I do not see their faces. I never do. Something is behind me, casting a shadow over them, over the sand, darkening the beach and the sea as the wind builds to a feral howl.
My body jerks awake.
I’m alone. Far from the beach, drenched in sweat upon my sleeping pallet. A ventilator whirs rhythmically in the dimness of my room and I shudder a breath. The fear fades. It was just a dream.
Above me on the bulkhead, the words of my fallen house glare down at me, etched into the metal. LUX EX TENEBRIS. “Light from darkness.” And spinning outward from those words like the spokes of a wheel are the idealist poems of youth, the wrathful, slashing script of adolescence, when I was all blood and fury and ruled by wilder passions. Then, finally, the first fledgling steps of wisdom as I began to realize how terrifyingly small I really am.