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“We are…in a way.” We turn the corner and I stop dead in my tracks. One of the most beautiful ships I

’ve ever seen sits beside ugly skuggi tactical ships like a two-comma Pink in a frontline brothel. She is sixty meters long, sleek hulled, equipped with twin-ion engines, two railguns, sensor-resistant hull, and is shaped like a sideways hammerhead shark. She is painted jade green. “Apollo’s cock, that’s a beauty.”

“A gift from Her Majesty,” Xenophon says, handing me the slim omnicard.

“Naw.”

“It is in your contract. A top-tier flier. It was collected from Quicksilver’s mansion in Nike. I daresay you’ll get more use out of it than he will.” I put in the contract because I thought I’d need an escape route out of here. I never expected to actually get it just when I’m thinking I may not need it. Still, I snatch the omnicard and practically levitate toward the ship. She’s not just a racer, she’s a deepspace tigress. Could probably run from Mars to the sun in two weeks flat. Well, maybe not that fast. “Keep in mind, tracking measures have been installed. And the children are not allowed within a kilometer of it.”

“Uh-huh.” I run my hand over the hull. “What’s the catch?”

Xenophon smiles as a gaggle of dignitaries comes around the corner. “I fear her maiden voyage will be as a taxi. What will you call her?”

I turn back to grin at the White. “Snowball.”

“It’s green.”

“Still a Snowball.”

* * *

—

As the South Pole slumps toward the gloom of winter, a wind the Obsidians call Breath of the Underdark moans through the glacial valley. This slow, incessant current will freeze the eyelashes off a man and blacken the skin in twenty minutes. It signals the beginning of darkness for the Pole.

From the warm confines of my thermal gear, two-thirds the way up a young mountain, all I feel is the gentle tug of nature telling me I don’t belong. I look around and the crouched braves behind give me a nod and murmur, “Kalt, Grarnir?”

“Njr, Grarnir kann njek kalt,” another says. “Fer ragnver en la.” I dust snow off my shoulder.

Cold, Gray Fox?

Nah, Gray Fox can’t get cold. God fire burns inside him.

I’m a walking, talking totem of invulnerability. A spirit warrior. Proof of the existence of gods. Only Ozgard knows I was under major psychotropic influence during the mine heist. The Obsidians either don’t know or don’t care that the hunterkillers didn’t fire on me because I had Gray DNA and held a mop. I wasn’t touched by the gods. I just wasn’t a threat, according to their software. All they know is that when Sefi and Valdir caught up, I stood amongst the enemy howling like an ice-veined banshee.

Sefi and Valdir hit like the hammer of god five seconds after I landed. Can’t rid myself of the sight of armored Obsidians hacking at tripod robots, or how their meat smelled as the robot lasers cleaved through five braves at a time.

Thirty-five thousand Obsidian crack troops died cleaning out the hunterkillers in the mines of Cimmeria. And me? Not a bloody scratch. Ozgard got me drunk for three solid days. Pax stood in amused silence when he saw me being carried on the shoulders of Valkyrie. Electra literally almost died laughing when I told them what’s what afterward in my rooms in Olympia. I thought she’d be jealous. But she thinks it’s the funniest thing she’s ever bloody heard, though the mop jokes are rather overdone. Now she actually talks to me without looking like she wants to cut my balls off.

That’s all it took?

Freihild and the skuggi are drunk with valor for their part in taking the mines. Several of the females have even been given the honor of taking part in the hunt. The men stand on the ledge with me, Valdir, and the highest-ranking male jarls, tribal leaders. They were no less brave in battle, and they know it. It has always been this way, but that doesn’t mean they like it.

Sefi and Pax peer off a ledge not twenty meters away amongst a long pack of Valkyrie hunters. The furs they wear are crusted in a shell of ice from days of tracking. It crackles when they move, and twinkles when light from the shoulder lamps of the mechanized guards catches in the gloom.

For six days the Valkyrie have stalked their prey. While Electra accompanied Freihild on the stalking expedition to the White Shards, Pax accompanied Sefi to find scale-trace at the Sundered Peaks. The know-it-all could tell you the molecular structure of Obsidian arrowheads, but couldn’t have cared less the day of their departure. The boy misses his mother.

Apparently Sefi knows something about children. It is difficult to hold on to grief after six days of whiteout conditions, frostbite, saddle sores, and sleeping in seal-hide lean-tos. Pax knows how lucky he is to sit in the saddle behind her. Of the Obsidian braves, not even Valdir ever has mounted a griffin for a hunt. Pax’s melancholy has been replaced by intense focus.

His head snaps back when a high-pitched whistle echoes across the glacial valley, several notes higher than the screaming wind. Xenophon, wrapped to his nose in thermal gear, explains to the political guests I ferried on the Snowball: Freihild is in motion. The chasers are out. The beast is flushed from its alpine cavern.

The killwing waits. Sefi waits.

The snow settles on her shoulders and bone helmet. She looks like a god of winter, a permanent and unyielding feature of the mountain.

A second whistle trills.

The younger Valkyrie look to her in expectation. The older hunters know the Queen’s patience and stay motionless. The guests murmur in excitement.