Page 80

But some greater, hungrier part of me scrambles after this new flicker of hope. Volga, I’m gonna save you, Snowball. Treat you like the queen you are.

“What’s the Julii paying you for the kids?” I ask, trying to distract myself and them. “Gotta be a big nut.”

“That is not your concern,” Sefi says. “Your answer.”

Time seems to thicken. I find myself nodding.

“No fealty,” I say. “I’m no one’s dog, and I’m sure as Hades not dying on Mars. You draw up a contract with Amani Guild specs—”

Xenophon produces a holodocument from a datapad and flicks it to the table. Sefi smiles. She knows who she’s doing business with. Clever girl. I glance through it. It’s Amani Guild specs all right, not some savage blood oath. Maybe the world is changing.

Sefi sips her wine as I eye the particulars. Three-year sunset clause. Contract void if I take zoladone. What is it with everyone? Recognition of skuggi deathmark on my life if I skip out. That’s fun, and probable. I breeze to the remuneration and feel my toes tingle.

The girls in six weeks. A quarter kilo of grade-A diamonds in a Martian month, a ship with the deed, a signing bonus of twenty-five million credits. Fuck me. They’re overpaying by a kilometer.

“I want the girls on signature.”

“No,” Xenophon says predictably. “You are a flight risk.”

“Then double the monthly salary. A half kilo plus expenses. Gonna be killing my neutral reputation throwing my lot in with blackops spirit killers, and my girls need retirement money.” The White begins to say no, but I cut it off. “Listen, milky. You’re the one with the scarcity problem. Fixed my leg up. Spared me from the Howlers. You need me for something you can’t do. And I’m betting it ain’t just teaching skuggi.” None of them react, but that’s not sa

ying much for these folk. “You can’t move your army from Earth without showing your cards. I get it. But that means something’s coming. You’ll tell me when I need to know. That’s fine. But I’m getting hazard pay, because I’m sure it’s gonna be manic.”

“You think highly of your talents, Mr. Horn,” Sefi says. “Or very little of your life…”

“Now it’s one kilo. Wanna go for two?”

I put my hand out for the kill.

Sefi’s entourage tenses at the insult. Even gibbering blackteeth know Obsidian rules of contact. But then she surprises me. My hand disappears beneath her seven gloved fingers.

“To a fruitful endeavor,” she says. “One more task. The Reaper’s boy is fond of you. He resists us. Bring him close. We may need insurance.”

“Sure, yeah, whatever.”

I grin as she releases my hand. I got you, Snowball. Just hold on and I got you.

“LISTEN UP, AND LISTEN GOOD,” I say just like my tessarius did half a life ago.

Two hundred black-eyed assassins watch me inside the empty hangar with suspicion. Taken from the remnants of tribes shattered by Gold after Sefi joined the Rising and formed into one of the most feared assassin groups in the war, they are all prime specimens, and not one of this skuggi band is over thirty.

Some, like their leader, Freihild, are barely taller than I am. Others are built like tree stumps, others taller even than Ragnar Volarus. Others spindly and clever-faced. Each wears their bone-white hair in a topknot and a pale blue sleeveless tunic with the Alltribe’s winged crest tattooed in black on either shoulder. Those will have to go.

“My name is Ephraim ti Horn, and I was once considered the third-best freelancer in Hyperion, which means I was the third-best freelancer alive. Two months ago, I became the best. Those rumors you’ve heard? They’re true. I stole the heir of the Reaper and the Sovereign, and the hellspawn of the Goblin and Victra au Julii. And I stole them twice, with nothing but a Red, a Green, and an Obsidian. Oh, and the second time I did it solo.”

They’re skeptical. Good. They take their cues from Freihild, who looks at me as I’d look at Volga trying to teach me how to use a coffeemaker. I glance at Ozgard, who stands beside me nodding along as if I spoke the greatest wisdom ever known. Since my fateful meeting with Sefi, he’s shadowed me like a somnolent ghost, eating walnuts, sleeping outside my door and sometimes in my room with absolutely zero understanding of personal space, private property, or hygiene. Somewhere in that time, he claims to be teaching Pax and Electra the ways of the Obsidian, but frankly I doubt it. I know drug addicts, and he smacks of one.

“Now, you lot have done some killing. You know that business. You’ve fallen in Rains, stormed breaches, killed Golds and a whole lot of people that looked just like me. You know asymmetrical warfare, direct action, and reconnaissance like the top of your bleached pubes. But your natural talents are not enough. Your Queen is of a mind that the world is changing, and you must change with it.”

Freihild yawns. I jab a finger at her. “You. What’s the best way to take out a killsquad of fully armored Gold?”

“When they stop to piss,” she answers. There’s laughter.

“Wrong. With a high-powered neodymium magnet.”

“That would not kill them,” she says.

“Killing ain’t your mission anymore. Your queen wants a kingdom, so she needs operators focused on the mission, not the kill.”