“I haven’t forgotten...” Dex felt heat sliding into his cheeks as he glanced sideways at Andi, then back at Soyina. “The other part of your payment, you’ll receive...”
“Now,” Soyina said, smiling like a predator. Her lips pressed together in a pout as she saw the look of horror on Dex’s face. “A deal’s a deal, bounty hunter. I’ll be waiting.” She stood up from the table, her chair scraping against the floor as she walked away.
Dex watched her slip into the bathroom, waggling a finger at him as she disappeared behind the closed door.
“You can’t be serious,” Andi said, her face aghast. “You’re actually paying her with...”
“I’m not paying her. I’m simply offering her memories,” Dex said. He stood up, mussing his hair with a hand as he backed away from the table. “You should know, Androma, how much fun five minutes with me can be.”
“Three minutes,” she said. “On a good day.”
“Jealous, love?”
“Hardly.”
He watched her reach across the table and down the rest of his mug in one swig. Then she pulled her hood over her head and settled back into her chair. “Good luck, bounty hunter. And this time, try not to lose your pants when you’re done.”
Dex froze midstep. “How did you...?”
Andi laughed from beneath her hood. “I have a reputation to uphold, Dextro. I made it a priority to learn every hidden detail about my partner’s past.”
With that, she dismissed him.
Dex turned on his heel and stalked toward the bathroom, cursing to himself as he left one devil behind and went to greet the next.
*
Lunamere was almost impenetrable.
They’d known it days ago, when not even Alfie’s advanced hacking systems could get any information on the prison moon, let alone an actual blueprint of the building. There weren’t any survivors to question—not because they couldn’t find any, but because they didn’t exist. Lunamere prisoners were there for life, or until death took them.
The moon on which the prison stood was a cold, barren wasteland. The prison itself, a towering fortress with no windows and only two doors.
One way in, for entering prisoners. “And one way out,” Soyina said, as she explained the map to Andi and Dex, leaning close so they could see her strange eyes light up when she spoke. “For the corpses.”
Andi looked up. “That’s it? No other exits? Not even...”
“It’s a prison, Dark Heart,” Soyina said with a wave of her hand. “Once you go in, you’re not meant to come back out. Fortunately for the two of you, I can take care of that part. You simply have to find your own ride inside, as we spoke of earlier, Dextro.”
“Ten thousand Krevs for a one-way ticket,” Dex said from Andi’s left. His jaw clenched as he spoke, as if he were holding himself back from saying something he’d likely regret.
Soyina smiled with all of her teeth. “Not nearly enough to make this worth my while. And yet here I am, helping you. I may as well offer myself up on a platter for Nor to slit my throat.”
Money talks, Andi thought. She looked back down at the map on the dimly lit screen Soyina produced, at the twisting and turning halls of Lunamere. It was seventeen levels, a building made of black obsidinite, mined from the moon itself. Impossible to shatter, scratch or dent, except with tools specially crafted to work the stone. And it was the only building on all of Lunamere that hadn’t been completely annihilated during the Battle of Black Sky.
“The cells,” Andi said. “What are they made of?”
“The same as the rest of the building. Don’t think you’ll be able to break out once you’re in. Men have gone mad trying to dig themselves out of the darkness.”
They went over the map for a while, Andi doing her best to memorize every inch of the layout. There were no elevators to reach the seventeen floors of the prison, and each stairwell would only allow them to descend one level. Andi and Dex would have to traverse the entirety of each hall—and dispatch any guards they encountered—in order to reach the next stairwell down.
Countless men and women—and children, if the rumors were true—had lived the remainder of their lives inside those prison walls. Andi felt sick as she looked down at the map.
In her mind, she saw herself four years ago, seated on a marble bench while hundreds of Arcardian soldiers stared back at her. Classmates, who now hissed her name like a curse. Teachers and trainers, whose bodies were rigid with hatred for her failure.
She saw a silver gavel gripped in an angry fist, the boom as it came down like a war hammer. The general’s twisted expression as he stared down at her, and Kalee’s mother with tears in her eyes, a sadness burning so deep that it scalded like the still-fresh lacerations on Andi’s wrist.
Guilty, the judge had intoned. Guilty of treason.
“Andi?” Dex asked.
He waved his hand in front of her face, drawing her back to the present. She shook the memories away to find Dex and Soyina staring at her.
“You have our plans,” Andi said. “Now I want to hear how you’re going to uphold your side of the bargain. Once we get ourselves inside, how do you intend to get us out?”
“Once you’re inside, I’ll locate your cells. It’s likely they’ll have the two of you near each other, on one of the upper levels. We’re reaching overflow levels this time of year.” She spoke as if the prison were one of Mirabel’s finest hotels, full of visiting tourists from all across the galaxy. “I’ll have your cells unlocked by the time you wake.”
“Wake?” Dex asked.
Soyina lifted a finger to her lips and smiled. “You have one hour to find your prisoner and free him before I myself will sound the alarms that you’ve escaped. What?” she asked, seeing Dex’s clenched jaw and fists. “A girl has to save her own skin somehow.”
“And how are we to track the time?” Dex asked.
Soyina considered this. “The guards rotate every half hour. That will be your marker.” She focused back on the map, pointing to a large section of rooms on the second level that led to the only exit door.
The one for the corpses.
“This room here will be your goal.”
“And that room is?” Andi asked.
“That, my dear friends, is my playground. My palace of pain. The prisoners come in, and I pick and choose the tools that will make them sing. And when they die? They go out that doorway on a transport ship. Up and away, out to float with the stars.”
Dex nearly choked on his drink. Andi simply stared the strange woman down, wondering how much she could really trust a person who derived so much joy from others’ pain. She killed to stay safe, to keep her crew alive when all the other options ran out. Afterward, she meditated and mourned the deaths. In sleep, the faces of the dead haunted her. But Soyina smiled about stealing lives, as if each death only upped her pride.
“What about weapons?” Andi asked. “Can you leave some in our cell?”