Page 66

“ T arget heading your way. Two hundred meters.”

Mike-the-Merc is a silky whisper in my ear. I’ve always liked the way the guy talks into a receiver.

I feel even more warmly toward him after finding out how he went against what he thought were orders from me to protect Chi and Kez’s family during Myhre’s attempted coup.

“Copy,” I acknowledge. “How’s he look?”

“Shaken,” Mike responds. “I guess he didn’t like what Drogan had to say.”

I smile to myself as I roll my shoulders, loosening up. I’m not sure the Horse-men will ever be friends. There’s an ideological gap as wide and deep as Kuseros’s oceans between us.

But, then, I’d have said that about the rats once upon a time, too. Look how that turned out.

I turn my head to my right, where my favorite rat-man sits, chewing a long claw and shading his eyes with the other hand.

“Starshine’s fierce in the Holy Lands,” I remark.

Acker scoffs. He pulls a ragged claw out of his mouth and scratches at the healing skin around his right eye.

Erin cut his eyes out after she pinned him and Kez to the wall.

Doc Gray stuck him in a tank for two weeks while he healed all the damage Erin did and regenned his eyes.

Kez spent a few days in the neighboring tank, since the doc had to tear apart her arms to get the monofilament out of her wounds.

I slept on a cot in front of the tanks. Ostensibly, I was guarding them. But really, I just don’t sleep well without my kitten beside me anymore. Guess that goes both ways.

“Holy lands,” Acker grumbles.

“You yuckin’ on the horseys’ yum?” I ask.

He scoffs again.

“Hundred meters,” Exeter interrupts from my left. He’s holding omnoculars to his face and watching the street below.

I’ll hand it to the fucker, when he decides to high-tail it outta somewhere, he moves.

“He’s turned east,” Exeter grumbles.

Don’t matter where Jaxon goes. I’ve got him boxed in.

“See you boys in a few,” I say before swinging over the lip of the roof we’ve been sitting on and dropping down a line of spider silk to the street.

I circle wide and block off Jaxon before he reaches the dusty shopfront where he was going to try to rent a sand skimmer.

The Horse-men are so anti-mech that Jaxon doesn’t have a lot of choices for his exit from Ystrile.

A barge to Kaliddy. The sole sand skimmer rental.

There’s a stable two blocks over but I figured that would be his last resort.

Probably too bitter a pill to have to rent a horse after being hold by a Horse-man to leave Eastern Colony or else.

Jaxon’s out of places to run.

I slap a length of grey rope against my thigh as I stroll toward Jaxon. He freezes when he sees me. Recognizes me.

“You’re dead,” he hisses.

“I get that a lot,” I tell him. “Funny how infrequently it ends up being true. What, you think when you found the skimmer burning and the water gone that B or Erin took me and Kez out? ”

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He’s lost weight in the three weeks he’s been on the run while we’ve healed.

His neck’s skinny and his cheeks are hollow.

Maybe he’s having trouble sleeping, although that would suggest he has a conscience and I’m not convinced of that.

Or maybe he’s run out of Payton’s credits and hasn’t been able to buy three squares a day.

That’d be nicely ironic here in the breadbasket of Kuseros.

“It all went bad,” Jaxon mumbles. “I was so close. I thought I had her. But there was nothing but ash.”

The Ojos’s explosives turned out to be pretty effective in that regard. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They were a Tyng product, after all.

I just didn’t know B’s little operation in Jielt was cranking them out along with a shit-ton of modified Hex.

“You never had her,” I tell him. “She’s mine.

She’s always been mine. She was just waitin’ for me to come find her.

” I slap the rope against my leg. “You shoulda realized how special she was back on that beach. You shoulda stayed away from her and her friends. You should never, ever have touched what’s mine. ”

He holds his hands up. I think he’s just realized he’s out of options. “I can pay you.”

I snort. “You really think you can pay me off?”

His eyes flick from my face to the rope and back. “We can work this out, man.”

“Sure, we can.” I pace steadily toward him. He retreats. If he looked behind him, he wouldn’t be so quick to backstep.

“Look, she killed three of my boys. I couldn’t just let that slide.”

“So you decided to team up with her worst enemy? Peddle the shit she hated, the shit that destroyed her family, across the planet?”

He glances left and right as he backs up, scuffing through the dust he stirred on his advance, still not seeing what’s behind him. I keep my eyes on Jaxon’s sweating face to avoid giving the game away .

“We all gotta earn somehow,” Jaxon grumbles. “Can’t live on air and Two.”

“Live fine on Hex, though, huh?”

“You can talk,” Jaxon sneers. “You’re the biggest Hex peddler in the system.”

I nod, acknowledging his point. “Not for long.” One of the Horse-men standing behind Jaxon stamps his hoof, either in annoyance at how long I’m taking or in disgust at the subject of our conversation.

It’s a sore subject; we had a long day yesterday convincing Drogan’s people that we’re shutting down the Hex trade.

In the end, like so many things, it came down to Lightfoot and her street cred.

Jaxon whips his head around and sees the line of Horse-men who have closed off the other end of the street.

“I’m leaving!” he snarls at Drogan and his men.

“Not fast enough,” Drogan responds. “Your ten minutes are up.”

Jaxon looks wildly at me, past me, toward the shop where he was hoping to buy his escape.

“Afraid that road’s closed,” I tell him, continuing to advance while he’s frozen between the enemy at his back and the one closing from his front.

“You-you’ve kept me here?—!”

I see the credit’s finally dropped. “Until your time’s run out? Yeah,” I admit. “Although I could argue your time was up a long time ago. You really think you could pop up in Hemos, threaten Kez, and I wouldn’t come after you? C’mon.”

“Erin and B—” he begins.

“Are dead,” I interrupt. Match fried B to get to Acker; Erin bled out with a rope around her neck. “Looks like you’re fresh outta friends.”

“And out of time,” Drogan says. I gotta admit, even I’m a little intimidated by the line of Horse-men.

Big fuckers. And they have that light of righteousness in their eyes.

“I told you to leave Ystrile to avoid Helas’s judgment.

You came to us with a false face, promising friendship, while you conspired with the enemies of Helas to spread fly-strike throughout Asdel’s Plains.

I gave you more mercy than you were due, given your deceit.

It is time for you to face Helas’s judgment. ”

Jaxon screams. Guess he’s familiar with what Helas’s judgment looks like.

Then he can’t scream because my noose and two others have landed around his throat. I pull my noose tight at the same time that Drogan and one of his Horse-men pull on theirs.

Jaxon’s pulled off his feet. He crashes to his knees, choking and grabbing at the ropes around his neck.

I release mine so the Horse-men can drag him to the hanging-place.

The Horse-man doesn’t dawdle. With a high yell that’s not too far off a whinny, Drogan’s lieutenant gallops off, dragging Jaxon behind him.

I follow at a more sedate pace. Put my arms around the two women waiting for me behind the line of Horse-men.

“You don’t need to watch this,” I say to Kez.

She rests her head against my shoulder. Slips her arm around my waist. Payton wraps her arm around my waist from the other direction; we walk together in the Horse-men’s dust.

“I feel like I do,” Kez says. Same thing she told me last night when I suggested she stay in Drogan’s yurt with his heavily pregnant mate today. “I need to see it end. I need closure.”

I don’t argue any more with her. My kitten knows her own mind.

“Payton, you okay?”

I don’t know Payton’s mind as well as I know Kez’s. I know Payton doesn’t think of Jaxon as an ex. I know she slept with him on her maker’s orders and not because of any feelings she had. I know Jaxon wasn’t kind to her. Doesn’t equate to wanting to watch him hung.

“Yes,” Payton says. I feel her squeeze Kez’s arm across my back. Maybe she’s not here because of Jaxon. Maybe she’s here because of Kez .

“Either of you want to leave at any point, just say the word.”

They nod in tandem.

By the time we catch up with the Horse-men, the show’s over. A crowd rings the scaffold where Jaxon hangs still under Helas’s unblinking eye, three bottles of Hex around his neck along with a plaque that says “yaul.”

“Sinner,” Kez says quietly as Acker comes to stand next to her. Exeter takes up a flanking position on Payton’s other side with Mike beside him. Good men.

“May he find peace and forgiveness in Helas’s embrace,” one of the nearby Horse-men responds in the same tone.

“May we all,” Payton says.

I nod. I stand with my arms around the girls, letting them find what they need. Closure. Revenge. Justice. Whatever name they put to it in their hearts, I let them have it. I’ll wait as long as they need. I want them to know it’s over.

Maybe the war ain’t won. Maybe this was just the battle, not the war. Maybe we still got enemies without and within to face.

But for today, for now, it’s over.

For today. For now. We’ve won.

The End