“Those little uppity pups.” He wags a finger at me over his tea. “You’re proper Martian. I’ve been too long here on this moon. Ten years, only a little back and forth. Everyone’s uppity. Putting on airs. I bet that’s what Lord Kavax sees in you. A breath of home. It’s what I like about you as well. So don’t you worry if the others don’t like you right away. It’s their own insecurity at the wretched creatures they’ve become….”
He puts a hand on my shoulder, like I need fatherly advice. “With all you’ve been through, the last thing you need to worry about is being popular.” I recoil. He can shove his advice right up his drill exhaust. But before I can tell him that, Sophocles darts out from under the table, snarling horribly. I almost piss myself. He pounces up onto one of Liago’s tables, knocking over beakers and test tubes, sending them shattering to the floor as he springs up toward an open window where a small pachelbel sits. The bird titters and flies back out the window. Sophocles hits the wall and slides down. “Out!” Liago shouts, looking in horror at his broken supplies. “Get him out of here! And don’t bring him back till I find out what mangles his wits!”
—
Later that afternoon, I leave Sophocles with Kavax and collect more treats and shampoo from the huge warehouse that supplies most of the Citadel with food. I spare a few minutes to smoke burners with the Reds who work the forklifts and stocking rooms. All are Martian, since Houses Telemanus and Augustus hire exclusively from home. Security reasons. Most of the older men and women were with them before the Rising.
“Any chance they found out what’s what with Sophocles?” one of the Reds asks. “Heard he’s gone mental.”
“You would too if they cloned you twenty-odd times,” says an old woman named Garla, exhaling burner smoke.
“Cloned?” I ask.
“Aye,” Garla says. “No one told you? Only ever been one fox in House Telemanus. Sophocles is seven hundred years old. This just happens to be his twenty-first life. He’s like me. Fourteen generations in service to the fox.” Her bandy legs dangle off the edge of a box of coffee stamped with Mars import markings. She pulls a chain from around her neck. “Kangax, the father of our liege, gave this to my own da.” She tilts it to me. The other Reds roll their eyes. It’s a monster cast in gold. “One of those wild carved beasties, a griffin. Kangax put a price on the head of a wild griff that was terrorizing their Zephyrian lands, and me father, just a docker like me, went into the mountains and shot it dead with a longbarrel scorcher.” I reach to touch the griffin, but Garla pulls it back and stuffs it in her shirt.
“So he got the bounty?” I ask. I’m at ease with these people, with their bluntness and the dirt under their nails. Some of their accents are even spot on for Lagalos.
“Aye. Bought out his contract and lost it all in a year.”
One of the other Reds laughs. “Got all high and uppity. Forgot he was a ruster.”
“Shut your bloodydamn gob,” Garla snaps. “And don’t use that word round me, hear? Ruster.” She spits. “That’s a slave word.” Her voice lowers and she shrugs at me. “Da liked to gamble. But Kangax hired him right back. No bad feelings. He was a good man. And Kavax is a good one too.” The others nod along. “Even if we just lug boxes and clean up shit, it’s our job to protect him here in this bloodydamn viper nest of a moon. All of us. Remember that.”
VOLGA, CYRA, AND I unload from the taxi onto the buzzing Hyperion street. The sliver of morning sky seen through a gap in the overhead bridges and buildings of the city above is as bright and blue as the dresses girls wear to the summer races at the Circada Maxima. This dilapidated deep level of Hyperion is naked under the high sun. Ancient buildings, moldering signs, forgotten by the progress above. Grafitti of upside-down pyramids embedded with screaming mouths score storefronts and alley walls. The Vox Populi seems to have an endless supply of paint.
On a building-side HC a newscast blares. A fatally serious Copper reporter drones on about the hunt for the Reaper after his murder of the ArchWarden. Hacked the man down in cold blood, they say. Sounds about right for the bastard. I might like booze, but power’s his cup of poison. The Colors are shocked, appalled that such an affront to the Republic could occur by their great hero. But after seeing the fall of one empire, I know enough to see the cracks in the foundation of this one.
I suck back a burner. With our preparations for the heist under way, we’ve been running eighteen hours a day. The first several days were strategic, scouting the viability of the three posited locations for the heist that the Syndicate provided. Once we picked one, I told Gorgo, our Syndicate liaison, the only way the task could be done proper was with a military-grade gravWell. I half told it to the Obsidian as a bluff to test the limits of his reach, but the Syndicate beast looked unfazed and kept smoking a burner over his espresso at the highrise café where we met. Said he’d run it by the Duke. He did. Said it would take two weeks. Guess dancing with the devil means you get hell’s resources.
I pull my wool overcoat tight against the early autumn chill and notice Volga staring up at a residential skyscraper with a sliver of green foliage on its roof.
“What would it be like to live up there?” she asks. “A garden atop the clouds.”
“After this you’ll find out,” I say.
Cyra snorts. “Don’t tease the crow. Even after this dreadnought of a payday, all of us together couldn’t buy that penthouse.”
“How much do you think it costs?” Volga asks.
Cyra shrugs. “Hundred million, maybe more.”
Volga shakes her head at the number, stunned on a primal level.
“There’s your Rising for you,” I say.
We cross the street after an automated grocery truck trundles past, and make our way across the fissured concrete to a small shop underneath a gaudy, glittering holosign proclaiming, KOBACHI’S TECH EMPORIUM. WON’T TAKE A BYTE OUT OF YOUR WALLET. Another sign underneath flashes: NO RUSTERS. NO CROWS. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Volga pauses outside the door. Cyra goes right on in. I pause and consider Volga for a moment. She kept my secret from the others. But the last few days she’s been sullen. “Want to see inside?” I ask.
She looks at the sign and shakes her head. “No, thank you.”
I sigh. “What’s wrong? You been slumping along like a wounded puppy since we took this job.”
She relents and looks at me hesitantly. “Are you not worried? Worried that this will hurt the Rising?”
“Life’s a mountain, Volga. Nasty, steep, covered in ice. Try to move it, you’ll go nowhere. Try to help someone else, you’ll fall right down with them. Focus on your own feet, and you just might make it up and over.” I reach up to clasp her muscled shoulder. “Now come on.”
“It will be trouble.”