Page 83 of Throwing Fire

Kez shrugs. “An hour? If he’s really bad off, we shouldn’t stay long.”

Plenty of time to pay a visit to the Vark boys on the way home from Kuus. “Sounds good. What about meetin’ with your mentor?” I’m not sure what use that meeting is now, since I’ve got a way to track Jaxon down. But Kez wants me to meet Liv. If it’s important to Kez, it’s important to me.

“My what?”

“Liv.”

Kez snorts. “I wouldn’t have called her my mentor.”

I would. Kez owes Liv a lot. Liv may not be the most compassionate person. It certainly doesn’t sound like it from Kez’s little story about her time in the tank. But Kez came out of her childhood with her soul intact, after being abandoned by everyone who should have cared for her. She has Liv to thank for that, even if she can’t see it right now.

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“She doesn’t want to meet.” Kez pushes the few remaining noodles around in the tray.

She doesn’t want to meetme. “That’s not a reflection on you, kitten. And I say we pay her a visit anyway. You know when she’ll be around?”

Kez nods. Looks up at me again. “Whatever she says, that’s not the way I feel, okay?”

“Okay.” I kiss her on the nose. Flick away the drop of dark sauce my lips leave behind. “I told you before, only person I’m ever listenin’ to about you is you. You got somethin’ you want to tell me, tell me. Everything else is just noise.”

Kez grins. “I want to tell you that you’re amazing. Even when you have noodle-breath.”

She can talk. “I want to tell you somethin’. I know who shot our skimmer down. It was your buddy, Dom Fox.” Her eyes widen, butshe doesn’t argue. “I got the vid to prove it. I’m gonna have Myhre turn it over to the C.P. Let them take care of it, nice and legal. That should shut the Foxes down for a while. But first I need to know if Dom bein’ in the Deeps was just a coincidence, or whether someone sold us out.”

Kez’s grin has faded while I’ve been talking. Now her soft mouth twists into a grimace. “You think it was a set-up.”

“Maybe. The Whites are at war, whether they admit it or not. Hundred CeeBees would come in handy.”

“I can’t believe Acker would do that.”

I don’t want to believe it. But I can. I’ve never known anyone who wouldn’t put their own interests ahead of mine. No one but Kez.

Flyingwith Kez is one of my favorite things. Well, one of my favorite things that ain’t sex. Since I’ve trained her, she flies the way I would. I leave her to do the things she does best and get on with the things I do best. My best thing is course plotting, something that was drilled into me so hard in SAWL that I can do it in my sleep. Kez enjoys the actual flying more. I occasionally check her course, which is perfect. While she flies, I tell her my plan for running Jaxon to ground.

“How well do you know the Varks?” she asks.

“Well enough to know that if I offer them more than Jaxon, they’ll give him up.”

“Then what?”

Then I hunt him down and kill him. “Whaddo you think?”

Kez sighs. “I don’t think you should kill him.”

Since when? Yesterday she was ready to help me. “Why not?”

“Because of the tag. I keep going back to what he said at the Gold Ball-Ball. He sounded like he didn’t even know about it.”

I thought so, too. But he’s the most obvious hitter. “Alb said Jaxon offered him big money for intel on you.”

Kez nods. “Big money is a grand. Maybe two. You’ve seen howthese guys live. I used to think ten thousand hard was huge. I had no idea what real money was. Those two runs I did for Mister Tyng? That’s as much as I made the whole previousyear. A hundred thousand is unimaginable for these guys. Payton was feeding Jaxon enough to throw around a thousand or two, but it was never big money. You’ve seen the numbers. And you know as well as I do that he hasn’t been saving what she’s been giving him. He’s been spending it. Hell, going back and forth between Eastern Colony and the Clouds a couple of times in style would make a big dent in what he’s been paid. Jaxon’s not the money, and Payton isn’t either. So there’s someone else out there who is willing to pay a hundred thousand to see me dead. I don’t think you should kill Jaxon until we figure out who that is.”

That makes a lot of sense, but it goes against my fucking grain. I want Snaggletooth dead. Anyone who tries to take my kitten away from me dies. That simple. “You got any other ideas?” I’ve told her about the mag-gun coming from the Tyng armory, but other than making her frown, the intel hasn’t gotten us anywhere new.

“This Drogan guy, although I can’t think of what I’ve done to piss him off.”

“Might not be personal to you?—”