“How do we have this information?” Volga asks grimly. “This will not just affect us. It is important to know.”
“They’ve got their tentacles everywhere.” I shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine. Question, Cyra.” I snap my fingers to bring her attention back from her high. “How long would it take for you to don your black hat and pillage some data from Epirus and Leomant?”
“The accounting firm? Depends on their firewalls. That’s some high-grade software. Why?”
“Because I need to know who pays whom. We need an inside man.”
“Bloodyhell…” Dano says, eyes fixed on his own datapad. “The Senate has just issued an arrest warrant for the Reaper.”
We look to each other, sharing the same morbid thought. A game is afoot and we are pieces on the board. I look out the window to Hyperion and wonder what is about to shake my city. But in the back of my mind, I care more about the collar on my neck and who really holds the leash.
I take the holocube that the Duke of Hands gave me and activate it. The pale light washes out the contours of my crew’s faces. The three locations glow in the air. I sit back in my chair, knowing they believe deep down we can pull this off. They’re young enough to have never failed. To never have been captured. But the chance for success is so small, so absurd, that I know we are gallows bound. Yet it seems a dignity to take that chance, to grasp it for all it is worth and not fall under the hacking of the blade of a bonesaw, not off the ledge of some thoroughfare, but on the stage, heart pulsing, feet racing, all the variables falling into place one last time.
The game is afoot. And finally, I begin to smile.
I’M BLIND WHEN THE COMMANDOS storm the ship. Their stun grenades emitted white flashes that activated every photoreceptor cell in my eyes. Though we surrendered, they beat us beyond sense. I take several rifle butts to the back of my head and finally reel sideways as one bloodies my nose.
They grab my hair and slam my head to the ground. A boot presses down on my head as they frisk me and cuff my hands behind my back with magnetic shackles. They latch a second metal cuff around my right ankle and jerk the two shackles together so that I’m hogtied, blind, and bellydown on the floor. Something tight slithers around my neck and constricts.
With six seconds of ancient method, they strip my humanity away.
I feel them dragging me. Slowly, indistinct shapes coalesce, though a pulsing blue afterimage remains in my vision. They carry the crew we rescued out of the ship with me.
I see one of them screaming uncontrollably and holding on to a metal panel. A soldier stomps on his hands till they break. The blood leaks down my throat from my broken nose. There’s horrible choking from someone nearby. Thick, asthmatic barking from animal throats and a blitz of commands.
Stay down.
Slag the floor.
Hands behind your back.
Nose to metal.
Nose to metal, gahja!
This is my fault.
Not the choice to lead us to the asteroid, but my hubris or vanity or misguided honor, whatever it was that led me off that lift, into the corridor, wasting seconds and then making the gamble that might now cost us our lives. And for what? Out of loyalty to a Color so devious they destroyed themselves? It was such an illogical chain of decisions of which I am ashamed.
A wet, mucus-filled mouth snaps centimeters from my face.
Scaled paws and serrated talons scratch the metal deck. I twist myself and see point-blank the four-legged kuon hounds—insectoid-canid hybrids. There are three of them; bred for war. Chitinous black shells along their torsos ripple gray as they move. Spines of needle-thick translucent hair stand on end upon their backs. The Gray houndmaster jerks the beast back from me. Its bark is deafening, its eyes yellow and compound. I shudder away from the hound, trying to master my fear.
It’s impossible.
My grandmother’s lessons and Aja’s meditations flee as my heart slams in my chest, and boots against the deck match the beat as a second squad moves up into our ship. A terrifying old Gold woman in a brown cloak with a bald pate and a laconic drawl issues orders to the soldiers around her to search the ship for bombs and other passengers. A Blue woman, one of the crew we rescued from the Vindabona, finds the chaos more than she can bear. She panics and tries to run.
They let her go, perhaps as sport, perhaps to set an example, and after her tenth step, the small metal cuff on her right ankle blinks green and detonates. The lower ends of the tibia and fibula explode. A flash of sizzling light cauterizes the wound. She screams and spills to the ground, leaving her foot behind. Leg wheezing smoke. The kuon hounds are released and pin her on her back, one tearing into her thigh, the other biting her right wrist, before waiting for the next command. The houndmaster looks to the old Gold woman. She gives the command herself.
“Yokai.” The old Gold looks to the largest of the kuon. “Hakaisuru.”
The largest kuon lunges like a rail slug out of a barrel and the Blue woman’s face disappears into its maw.
“Stop!” I shout, trying to rise up.
A steel-toed boot disabuses me of my empathy.
—
When I come to in a small pool of my own spit, I see the world sideways. The boot is still on my head. Nausea wraps me in a hot cocoon. There’s weeping to my right from the lowColors we rescued. Two of the hounds are still hunched over the Blue woman, snapping and snarling as they feed on Blue bones brittle from a youth spent in low gravity. I force myself to watch and see what my mistakes have wrought.
Cassius meets my eyes from his place on the ground nearby. His face is unrecognizable but the cool look there gives me strength. Patience, it says. I focus on breathing, on allowing everything else to rage around me, and control myself.
A bored young Gold with a hollow, pale face stands with her boot on Cassius’s head and her hasta, a long razor, balanced just above his spinal cord. Pytha shivers in fear beside me, listening to the hounds feed.
“Do not be so maudlin, gahja,” the woman says to Pytha, pulling up her head by the hair so she must watch the kuons feed. “It’s just carbon.”