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“Not just sending the Collector?”

“Thank Jove, no. I hate that pervert. Something wrong with him down to the bone. Word is she’s coming up from Lost City in the flesh to pay the Duke a call. Something to do with the big prize he just scored.”

“I heard it was missiles.”

“Idiot. It’s not missiles. It’s a Howler.”

“It’s missiles. The Howlers have all disappeared.”

“Not all of them. Arrested a few on Mars and Earth and out on Mercury. Don’t you watch the news?”

“Why? You watch for me. What do you reckon she looks like? Big tits?”

“Obsidians don’t have tits. They have pectorals.”

“I heard she was a White—”

The lift arrives and they disappear inside. When the doors close, I drag the Duke back out. The blood is still smeared on the call button. I wipe it off as I call another. Sweat slithers down my armpits. The next lift arrives, no one inside. We enter and I press the button to carry us down. The doors take forever to close. My mouth aches with pain. The cloth is already saturated with blood. I spit it out and stick in another swab. The Duke stands quietly facing the doors.

“How do you think this ends?” he asks.

“Probably with me in a furnace,” I admit.

“They will catch you. The things they will do…”

“If I’m caught, you won’t be around to worry about me.”

“She won’t just torture you, Gray. She takes her time.” His voice has caged the madness, but its fingers work at the bars. This job was supposed to end with me dead. If it comes down to it, I’ll put the pistol in my mouth and eat iron. Better my way than theirs.

I position myself behind the Duke and the doors open. I push him out and down quiet halls. Blood drips from my chin onto the floor. We come to a set of double doors, through which, ostensibly, is the vault. “Remember, keep your head,” I tell the Duke. He makes no reply. I lean past him to open the door and push him in.

Three men lounge outside the vault, smoking burners in the windowless room. Their guns are on the table. They turn from their Karachi cards to see us and they freeze. I shut the door behind me. “Not a move or I kill him,” I say, just a little less surprised to see them than they are to see me. One twitches toward his weapon. He stops when he stares down the barrel of my Omni. They watch it like it’s the head of a snake, eyes darting to me, their guns, the Duke. “Not a move,” I say, inching forward. “Tell them to get on their bellies,” I tell the Duke.

“Get on your…” With a sudden scream, the Duke rears his head back into my nose. I hear a wet pop and see stars. Then I’m pitched sideways as the Duke throws himself onto my arm, wresting the Omnivore sideways. “Kill him!” he’s screaming. “Kill him, you fucking halfwits!”

I punch the Duke in the side of his head and wrench myself away from him so that he sprawls out in front of me. The Obsidian has picked up his railrifle and is raising it. I shoot wildly and miss. I stare down the barrel of the Obsidian’s railrifle. I shoot again. The bullet lances forward at two kilometers a second, sparks off the tip of his rifle, and carries on to take off the top half of his head. The other men grab their guns. One crouches and fires a pulseRifle. The sound consumes the room. I fall to my belly as a stream of fists of rippling translucent energy spew over my head, raining debris down on me. I fire from my belly on full auto. The bullets eat into his knee and torso, chewing half his body into a flopping, oozing mass. The last man drops his gun, surrendering.

I stand, my eardrums throbbing. The smell of ozone thick in the room. Holes from the hot metal smoke in my suit’s long tails. The last man, a Brown with tattoos consuming the left side of his face, holds up his hands. I shoot him in the chest. He flies back into the wall and drips down, his suit catching fire at the edges of the entry wound. The barrel of the Omnivore smokes, so hot I can feel it on my knuckles. Sounds come to me like I’m underwater. Numb, I haul the Duke from the ground and push him past the ruined bodies to the door as the Brown’s burning suit fills the room with smoke. My Omni has one slug left. I strip open the magazine on the dead Obsidian’s rifle and push the larger-caliber rounds into the hilt. I close the bottom and the autonomous forge heats the handle as it forms new slugs for the hungry gun.

“Open it!” I push the barrel to the back of the Duk

e’s neck, singeing his flesh.

He presses a series of commands into the door with his good hand. I’m out of my own body, numbed even to the pain of my mouth, the barbarism of the scene and what the gun in my hand did bringing back the hell of the block battles. I don’t know how far the sounds went. A scanner slides open on the huge doorframe. The Duke presses his eye to the little light. It flashes and a green positive code flickers on the door’s display.

“A murder of crows is nary a flock,” he says hoarsely. The light blinks yellow and requests he try again. He clears his throat desperately. “A murder of crows is nary a flock.”

This time it takes: a second light blinks green on the display and deep inside the door the tumblers begin to rotate and metal bars roll back. With a satisfying thunk the massive door unlocks. I edge past the Duke and haul it open. I push him through.

The inside of the vault makes me stumble.

It’s like the dragon hoards from one of Volga’s little storybooks. Mountains of cash and jewels and priceless works of stolen art fill the cavernous metal chamber. A fifteen-million-credit diadem lies errant beside a stack of Titians and Renoirs and Phillipses. A chest of Gold razors lies open; signet rings are heaped together like a child’s collection of pebbles from an ocean shore. Samurai masks and framed documents in illegible cursive and real ivory tusks and precious gems as big as duck eggs.

And amongst all this, in a cleared space on the floor, lies a cage with a single mattress inside and plates of chicken bones, a half-empty jug of water, a bucket of human waste, and the most valuable children in all the worlds.

I RUSH TO THE CHILDREN’S CAGE. A curtain of humid, urine-filled air hits me as I enter the unventilated room. Throwing the Duke down on the ground, I look through the cage to the boy and girl. The singing of my eardrums is fading. “Hello, little humans, you might remember me.”

The girl spits at me. “Syndicate scum.”