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“You think any individual can survive on their own in a war? You’re part of a unit. You have to trust every member of that unit. And right now, I don’t trust you not to get someone else killed. So you can either obey, or find another outfit.” I might admire her spirit, but not her control. “Do you hear me, lancer?”

For a moment I worry she’s going to spit more bile at me, but she regains her composure and snaps to rigid attention. “Hail Reaper.”

She storms out and Kieran breathes a sigh of relief.

“Thanks for the help,” I mutter.

He grins up at me innocently. “Looked like you had everything under control.”

—

Exhausted and feeling my temper getting a bit raw, I follow Kieran’s instructions to Quicksilver’s stateroom on the third level. Sevro’s commandeered the captain’s lounge’s speakers to blast some sort of classical rhyme ruckus that would have made Ragnar’s ears bleed, and Clown is whining loudly about someon

e stealing the blankets from his room.

The noise cuts off as I shut the door to my stateroom. For the first time in seventy-two hours, I’m alone. The room is certainly not as the Venusian shipyards intended—military austerity replaced by luxurious walnut and oak. On closer inspection, I see that there are holoprojectors built into the furniture. I turn on the ocean feature and soon waves crash against rocks on the walls. Sea stretches in every direction. I half expect Lorn to step around the corner. I sniff. The room smells like brine from the olfactory feature. “Not bad, Quick. Not bad at all.” The ceiling has turned cornflower blue and a gull flies overhead, reminding me of the beach I visited with Mustang on Earth in that breath before the war began in earnest. When I held my son for the first time and thought only of the world I would make for him. It breaks me to see how far I have turned from that path.

I peel off my own scarabSkin and liner and shower under scalding water in the marbled bathroom. Alone, my thoughts wander to my son. I try not to think of his eyes when I flew away, my razor soaked in Wulfgar’s blood. Overcome, I grip the key around my neck. At the bedside, I find a slim holoframe beside a bottle of Lagavulin 16. My wife and son float in the frame, smiling at me. Quicksilver must have had it sent. The picture was taken by my mother on the steps down to the water at Lake Silene. Another memory of theirs I never shared. Feeling hollow, I slip into bed and let the tears come quietly in the dark.

—

In the morning, the pelican, carrying my brother, Rhonna, and the support Howlers, departs south for New Sparta, Africa, and we head to the stars, rising up from the mountains, fresh covered with snow from the night’s storm, and ascend gradually into orbit. To blockade a planet is nearly impossible. You’d need the whole Republic fleet to even have a chance at it. The Nessus’s advanced stealth hull hides us from the orbital scanners, and by the time we are visually detected, we are already pushing for deep space. With these engines, nothing will catch us.

As Earth shrinks behind us, I watch it on the holoscreen, staring not at the oceans or the mountains or the glittering cities under the slow-moving veil of night, but at her moon, where my child will be tucked away in his bed and my wife will be in her office poring over documents until the small hours of the morning. I feel the distance grow between us, and I wonder if this is what it is like to be a bad father—always finding a reason to be gone, a reason that, no matter how virtuous or shining in the eyes of a child, will seem empty and false in the memories of the man he will soon become.

A WEEK AND A HALF after my first encounter with the rabbit, Kobachi finishes his custom work four days behind schedule, and three before the main event. Pisses me off because he’s slagged with my timetable. Would not be nearly as troublesome if it weren’t for the sudden increase in security in Hyperion. Something has happened, something they don’t want the general public to know. There’s no news on the HCs. Nothing but the political war between the Sovereign’s Optimates and the Vox Populi as they masticate each other in the press on the merits of the Peace. Half the fleet from Mercury is coming home, so the talking heads say, because the Senate is terrified the Reaper will rally the whole Armada and return to dissolve their power. Meanwhile we’re on overdrive adjusting our plan to ensure the increase in security doesn’t slag all our hard work.

Kobachi is making some last-minute adjustments, bent like a nearsighted hierophant over his workbench. I ease my nerves by smoking half a pack of burners in a crusty formFab chair. I go through correspondences from contractors on my ghost datapad, my tenth in the last month. Even using Syndicate freelancers, everything has to be done piecemeal so no contractor can point a finger my direction if this blows up in our faces. Which, despite the thoroughness of my plan, seems to be the outcome we’re racing toward. I feel like I’m the only one who knows it. Cyra and Dano are both infected with the excitement of all the new gear, while Volga sulks around like someone stole her favorite toy. Whenever I ask about her mood, she puts on a brave smile and says it’s nothing. Knowing her, she’s having second thoughts about the job. But doubts have never stopped her from following me before.

I smile when I see a message from the Obsidian beast himself: Gorgo has the gravWell. I’ll be damned. I feel like a kid who wished for a lizard and woke up to a dragon sitting on the lawn.

I look at my watch. I’m to meet the rabbit at Aristotle Park at two in the afternoon, and it’s already pushing one. Cyra and Dano wanted me to make the plant on the girl the first day out. They worried I wouldn’t be charming enough to ensure I’d see her again. Too many variables, they said. Cyra knows computers, and Dano knows angles, but leave the human condition to me.

We kept correspondence since I last saw her. It started facile. Sharing little jokes, musings on the superciliousness of Luna’s jewel-bedecked denizens. It was a bore at first. She was just a child realizing she could mock the world. I expected the vitriol to continue to pour out. But the more comfortable she grew, the kinder she became and the heavier the black, gnarled weight in my stomach grows. In some ways she reminds me of Trigg. Small-town, good heart waltzes into the big, rotten city; and here I am, the welcoming party. Some people just have shit luck.

I look at my watch again, annoyed.

“Kobachi. Almost done?” He doesn’t answer. “Hey, gecko, I’m talking to you.”

Kobachi starts and peers up at me, his eyes magnified by the lenses. “Quite. Quite. Come have a gander.” He shuffles to the side to make way for me. I pick up the small metal drone from the table, turn it over in my hands and match it with the Bacchus pendant already around my neck. Perfect replica, but a bit heavier. “The face is just as you requested. Sweet and gentle, lively and compassionate, but the devil’s behind the eyes, eh?”

“Will it work?”

“I bet my reputation on it.”

“Not just your reputation, Kobachi.” I pat him on the cheek and slip the pendant around my neck, shoving the other into my pocket. I head to the door. “The Syndicate will cover the expenses.”

I change into Philippe’s clothes in Kobachi’s lavatory and fix his beard to my face. I apply the makeup for my fake scars and insert the blackmarket retinal forges, which turn my eyes a gray so pale it could almost be white. I twirl an extendable cane out before me in front of the mirror and work my face through the gamut of emotions to check for creases in the makeup and resFlesh scars. “A pedestrian’s penchant for circumambulatory locomotion is the pedantic paroxysm of a pleonasm of peremptory drivers and sometimes leads to imperfectly preventable parricide.” I repeat the phrase four times till I have Philippe’s pretentious multisyllabic-adoring accent down pat. Satisfied, I check the Bacchus pendant one last time and tuck it away. The cool metal slips under my shirt and waits against my skin. It’s uncommonly heavy. Will she notice? I stare at myself in the mirror. My pupils huge in the low light. I sink into the darkness in them, remembering how the Gold spit Trigg with her razor. Holiday’s words slither back.

What would he think of me now?

I reach for the zoladone dispenser and activate the blighter on my collar.

—

After catching a taxi to Aristotle Park, I find the rabbit waiting for me underneath an old sycamore that’s seen at least five Sovereigns. She’s watching squirrels chase each other along the boughs. “Finally!” she says, bursting to her feet and looking up at me with those big rusty eyes. Her hair is more fashionable now. Straightened and hanging to just below her ears. I liked it better the other way. In the reptilian chill of the zoladone, I vivisect her. The city is already changing the girl. The hair, the silver nail polish, the faux-leather black jacket she wears with purple lights on the sleeve—eroding the romantic rustic mystique I built around her. The city never infected Trigg, except for those coral earrings and that sad jacket. Least she still talks like she’s from a mine, for now. “?’Lo, geezer, I was startin’ ta think you’d been hit by a bloodydamn train. I’m almost an old maid here.”

That’s not what she was thinking