Page 48

Acker pulls away from me. No, he don’t get off that easy. I step to the side so I’m facing him again and clasp both shoulders. “Talk to me.”

“Tiancha—”

“She’s gonna be okay.” Now I understand why he’s straining to hold it together.

If Kez was lying in that bed, so still, so burned, would I be as controlled as Acker’s been?

“Show me where they came through. Then I’ll question Payton.

We’ll figure out where the leak is and plug it with extreme fucking prejudice. Together.”

Acker holds himself taut under my hands, head down, chest heaving. After a moment, he nods. He looks up and meets my eyes. His are raw. “When the Ojos attacked?—”

He thought I’d fucked him. “I know what it’s like to suspect everyone all the time.”

“We’ve both learned hard lessons.” Acker reaches up and grips my wrists. “We captured one of the Ojos. He will tell me nothing. But I suspect you have ways of extracting information that I do not. ”

Yeah, I do. “We’ll save him for last. Show me where they came through.”

Acker nods and squeezes my wrists before letting go.

I convince Kez to stay behind, but it’s an argument, and the only reason I win is because Grace offers Kez a shower and a change of clothes.

My kitten gives me the blackest stink-eye she’s ever given me but allows Grace to lead her away.

Acker helps me stow the gear bags in an empty chamber where their reek won’t infect anything else.

I take a fresh biosteel vest and two bandoliers of knives out of the bags, and accept the clean pants Acker offers me.

We’re not the same foot size – well, paw size – so I have to keep my wet, rank boots.

Maybe I can use them to terrify the Ojos into telling me something.

After changing in front of Acker, who has several things to say about the number of weapons I’m carrying, but at least he’s talking to me again, I follow him through the Deeps.

Beyond his suite, evidence of the Ojos’ attack is everywhere, from the rats hurrying from place to place striped with newskin, to a couple of cave-ins that Acker skirts, to the dust that covers every surface.

I stop at one cave-in and examine the fallen rocks. Sniff the air, thick with the dry scent of rock-dust. There’s another scent, one I recognize.

“What’d they use?” I ask Acker.

He shakes his maned head. “I lack your experience in such matters, and this is where it will hurt me and my people?—”

“Forget that. Tell me what it looked like.”

“Small black tubes. They jammed them into the walls and threw them among my people and ran, then left my people to die in flames?—”

Sounds like PBEx, a compact explosive that can be detonated from a distance with a high-frequency signal. “Was there a whine before they blew? ”

Acker nods. “Like an insect buzzing.”

Yeah, that’s what a high-frequency detonator sounds like to me, too. “You got comms in here?”

Acker nods and pulls out an eskey. He fits it to his ear, where it sits awkwardly, being designed for a human ear.

“Call Kez,” I tell him. “Tell her to get Gig out here now with every piece of gear he can carry. We need a signal blanket.”

I wait while Acker relays this over the eskey to Kez. He’s silent while Kez responds, then he says, “About an hour.”

After he signs off, I ask, “Gig’ll be here in about an hour?”

That’s fast work. I figured the kid would need some time to pack at least.

Acker flashes the first grin I’ve seen since we arrived. “My Wisdom is awake and asking when we’ll be back. She wants to ensure that we eat.”

I clap him on the shoulder. “Told you she’d be okay.”

Acker nods and some of that awful bleakness leaves his eyes.

I gesture him on down the tunnel. Acker sets off slowly, unwinding the eskey from his ear. I don’t ask why he doesn’t keep it on. It looks uncomfortable from a distance.

“Why don’t you wear an eskey?” Acker asks. “Surely with the resources you have now?”

“Yeah.” I could be wired nine ways to fiveday. “I did that for years with SAWL. No one is ever wiring up my ass again.”

“You prefer to be a ghost,” Acker observers.

“Mmm. I know they say eskeys are untraceable. Too much noise to pick out one signal, right? Don’t believe that shit. I shot one poor fucker on Phogath straight through the ear by tracing his eskey signal.”

Acker looks askance at the eskey in his paw before shoving it into a pocket. “How long were you in the military?”

“Ten years standard.” I got my iridium button right before I shipped to Tje Dhos.

“You must have been very young when you signed up. ”

“Seventeen standard.” Feels like a lifetime ago. I wasn’t naive or idealistic even then – too much time in juvie – but I don’t have much in common anymore with that big, brash kid who thought it would be fun to fight for a living. “When’d you take over the Whites?”

“Eight years ago. I was nineteen standard and had just survived the Change.”

That makes Acker Kez’s age. I’d pegged him as older. Those eight years have been hard.

“Some don’t?” I ask. I know black-market geneering carries risks, but I thought they were of the ugly, rather than the fatal, variety.

“Sadly, no. And your modifications? Were you born with them or did you undergo your own change?”

“I was geneered on Paggen for the atmosphere mines, so I was born with most of ‘em. But I bought a new face and eyes after I outed Tol Seng.”

Acker stops in mid-step and stares at me. “No one escapes Tol Seng.”

Kez said the same thing. Under pretty similar circumstances, when I think about it, only we were leaving the rats’ tunnels instead of descending deeper into them.

“Yeah, well, there’s a first for everything.

You know, I crawled through shit to break out of Tol Seng, too. Smelled pretty much the same.”

Acker glances at my boots as he begins walking again. “I will find you some fresh boots.”

“Not yet. I might use the stink to scare the Ojos into telling me somethin’.”

Acker chuckles.

“Listen,” I say. “I might have to use somethin’ stronger than stink to find out what I need to know. You don’t want to stick around for that, I won’t hold it against you.”

Acker twitches his whiskers. “If you can endure doing... whatever it is you need to do, I can endure watching you do it.”

“It can be tough to watch,” I say, remembering the times I had to watch interrogations in SAWL.

It was part of advanced intel training, during my fifth year.

I’d already seen plenty of shit by then, but interrogation training was its own special kind of hell.

“Leaves a stain.” I scrub my fingertips along my breastbone.

“Is that how you think of yourself? Stained?”

“Nope.” I tap my chest. “Nothin’ left in here to stain.”

“There’s enough left for Lightfoot.”

“So she says.” I shrug. I gave up trying to figure out what Kez sees in me long ago.

Acker smiles, showing all those sharp teeth. “I will trust Lightfoot’s judgment in this.”

“Did you know Kez before that night in the Eff Tubes?” I ask, referring to the first time Kez and I met Acker.

I haven’t asked Kez if she knew Acker before that night.

She certainly knew of him, but Kez has made it her business to know about Kuseros’s underground, so there aren’t many players in it that she doesn’t know.

I doubt Acker has her encyclopedic knowledge.

“I had never spoken to her before that night. But her reputation precedes her.”

Not the first time I’ve heard about Kez’s impressive street cred. I shake my head. “I must be the only person on the planet who didn’t know who she was.”

“Perhaps you spent too little time underground.” He skirts a pile of rubble on the tunnel floor and turns up a side-passage that’s seen some serious action. The floor’s covered in loose rock. The tunnel walls are heavily pocked.

I run my fingertips over a charred streak that ends in a blast hole. “Was this Match?”

Acker stops beside me and nods.

“Where were you?”

“Returning from escorting your woman out of the Deeps. I took her out a different way, thinking that it was safer, that I would divert attention?—”

I grip his shoulder. “Stop blamin’ yourself. Maybe this is on me. Maybe not. Either way, we’ll find out.”

Acker nods but keeps his head down and doesn’t meet my eyes.

I peer up the partially collapsed, fire-blackened tunnel. “Where does this lead?”

“The basement of a v-loop shop on the Night Market.”

I can see why it’s little used. Even on a world as permissive as Kuseros most people don’t want to be seen frequenting sex shops. “What’s the access?”

“A security membrane and an airlock.”

“Anyone got the access codes?”

“Yes, a few of my people, but not many. It was really just for the shopkeep and his family.”

I turn to look at Acker. “Would they give you up to the Ojos?”

“I would not have thought so. Kestor is one of us. But—” Acker shrugs fatalistically.

Yeah, I know that feeling. “You got any need for this entrance?”

Acker shakes his head. “We have others in the Night Market. As I said, it was really just for Kestor and his family.”

“Then we seal this fucker up. How many other entrances into the Deeps?”

Acker’s whiskers twitch and the muscles of his chest and shoulders tighten. I wait. He either trusts me or he doesn’t. “Eleven,” he says finally.

I have enough tinglers for eleven entrances.

“I brought tinglers. Surveillance system. We set up a tingler at each entrance. That way we know before the Ojos come knocking again. Can you and your people hole up in the Deeps for a few days? Limit ins and outs to one or two entrances that we can defend?”

“Yes. There’s much to do with the wounded and rebuilding what the Ojos have damaged.”

“Good, let’s get on it.”