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Vela had already dissected that theory only to find it hollow. The footage had captured evidence enough. People seldom noticed the tics they picked up from their closest cohorts—common quips, facial expressions, even the occasional vocal lilt. In this case, all six thieves shared the same effortless, arrogant, lopsided…

Perhaps the drink had helped to untangle Vela’s cluttered thoughts. Perhaps they’d sorted themselves as she spoke them aloud. Either way, the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.

Vela’s breath hitched.

Fyn noticed. “Everything alright?”

“Just anticipating a hangover.” Vela forced a laugh, swirling the remnants of her drink in one hand as she snuck the other into her purse. “If I’m going to suffer anyway, I might as well indulge. Care to top me off?”

When Fyn reached for the bottle, Vela surged forward and clasped a titanium cuff around her wrist. A gravitational anchor slammed to the table, and several expensive ounces of Camdian Violet spilled to the floor.

Fyn’s too-familiar smile tilted further.

“Youarea clever one, aren’t you?” she asked, taking on a rich, masculine timbre.

Before Vela could react, the supposed-Marisian’s arm began to pulse and shiver, stretching into the slick, purple tentacle of a Cetaloid. The captive slipped free and rushed away, waving freshly formed fingers before racing down the nearest staircase.

Vela gave chase, spitting swears. By the time she reached the first floor, the suspect had vanished. She spent another hour scouring the drinkhouse, knowing all the while her effort was pointless. Roughly two hundred bodies mingled in the crowd, and her target might have been wearing any of them.

* * *

Later that night,as Vela crawled into yet another hard and lumpy boarding room bed, her wrist console chirped brightly. The image of an envelope appeared on the screen, both the sender and subject lines blank.

Upon opening the message against her better judgment, she was rewarded with a cryptic link and a simple, three-word taunt.

Tag, you’re it.

chapterthree

Twenty-five million zenna.

It was more than the entire population of Phaunos made in a year, and it was sitting comfortably in Vela’s bank account. The link that revealed as much vanished with a single click. She could find no receipt of transfer, no record of deposit, no evidence of a breach, but she knew exactly where the money had come from. If Central saw the numbers—and theywould, next time they paid out a bounty—it would raise a lot of uncomfortable questions.

The last thing Vela needed was to be labeled an accomplice to the very crime she’d set out to avenge.

She logged out of the library database with a frustrated growl, having learned next to nothing in three days of research. The Wanderlings were…enigmatic, to say the least. No one knew which planet they hailed from, though they were sprinkled liberally throughout several galaxies. Their mutative qualities made them difficult to identify, let alone research. Most scholars posited they were an advanced variant of Vela’s people, and that their shifting abilities had evolved from the Phaunids’ own, less flamboyant adaptive traits.

“Advanced,” as it happened, was a subjective term. No, Vela could not morph into other creatures. She could not grow gills to breathe miasma or sprout whiskers to sense electrical currents. But Wanderlings could not bend spacetime to leap between worlds on a whim. If one ever managed to blink, even after taking on a Phaunid’s form, their final transformation would be into a puddle of putrid goo.

Disillusioned by the lack of hard data, Vela sulked toward the library entrance. It had been ages since someone had taken up so much space in her mind, and with so few factors to focus on. She’d nearly reached the locker lounge when she allowed the commotion beyond the picture windows to distract her. Marisians in hooded smocks scrambled in the glow of the streetlamps, holding mesh sacks open to catch falling flecks of green. Whenever a bag filled, they tossed it into a wheeled bin and ripped another from a tear-away roll.

Vela had read about the algal rains which accounted for much of the local diet. They only occurred when the tides were at their “lowest”—a term which had nothing to do with the depth of the miasma and everything to do with its density—leaving the air too thin to hold the clouds aloft.

Feeling inquisitive in the boldest way, Vela left her gear in the locker and marched through three sets of sliding doors to brave the dark of day.

The first breath was agony. It always was.

Miasma evaporated within her, coating her throat with condensation. Each droplet was a tiny, searing ember. She could feel them rolling down her bronchial tubes, pooling like magma in her lungs. For a frantic moment, her limbs leeched cold, and the world went white.

With a few desperate coughs, both the burn and chill subsided. Color returned to the city one garish billboard at a time. Pinpricks swarmed in her fingertips, trailed by comfortable warmth. She wiped miasmic dribble from her satisfied smile. Had she pulled the same stunt at high tide, she might have drowned before adjusting.

Giddy and thrill-drunk, she tipped her head back, hoping to catch the pastel pulse of a zephyr fish or the prismatic twinkle of a cloud jelly drifting through the sky. Unfortunately, the city’s glow drowned the darkness, turning it to a charcoal haze sprinkled with drifting detritus.

Another time, perhaps.

Emboldened by how adaptive she could be, Vela pulled up the city’s business index on her console. If it was a game the Wanderling wanted, she would play by her own rules.

* * *