Page 7

W ith a great deal less drama than our first trip to the Cloudlands, which landed me in Doc Gray’s chop shop with a fist-sized hole in my shoulder, Kez brings us in for a perfect six-point landing at Tiv’s spaceport. I give her a nod of approval.

She grins. That grin, like the wonder that lights up her eyes when she flies, makes her look a decade younger than her twenty-seven standard. I see the kid she was when Kez flies. It’s a sweet, mischievous, adventurous side that Kez shows me a lot, both in and out of bed. I like her inner kid.

Speaking of kids. “What’d they say about Nev?”

Kez sighs as she climbs out of her chair and retrieves her backpack. “Nothing new. They want to run more tests. She’ll have given birth by the time they finish running all these tests.”

“They talk any more about—” I leave the last word unsaid.

Kez knows exactly what I mean. We’ve talked about it several times over the last two weeks.

Kez’s best friend is eight months pregnant.

She’s also a Hex addict, and Hex fucks up fetal development.

While she’s riding the snake , Nev doesn’t care.

It’s only when she gets clean that she rains guilt all over herself and everyone around her. “Pretty soon, it’ll be too late.”

Kez nods. “Next five-day.”

Could be good timing. I don’t really want to be around to deal with the consequences of Nev’s decision, one way or the other. Hopefully by the time we get back from Yrillo the worst of the drama will be over.

“C’mon, kitten.” I hold my hand out to her. Her grin has faded and the light has gone out of her eyes while we’ve been talking about her fuck-up friend. “Let’s enjoy tonight, just you and me.”

“Just you, me and a couple hundred rats,” she says as she shoulders her backpack, takes my hand and tucks herself against my side. But she’s grinning again. “Think we’ll meet Grace this time?”

“That’ll add spice to the meal,” I say.

“Yeah,” Kez snorts. “Like cyanide.”

The Deep Whites may be heavy Mods, but they manage to fuck up their lives just like everyone else.

Acker, the alpha of the rat-pack and the man we’re here to see, has a woman, Tiancha, who he calls his Wisdom.

Tiancha’s a tiny, brindled rat-girl with the biggest, blackest eyes of anything, human or animal, I’ve ever seen.

Acker must drown in those eyes every time he looks at her.

But Acker also has another woman, Grace.

Kez and I haven’t met Grace, but Kez got an earful about her from Tiancha when Acker and Tiancha came over to dinner at my place last week.

Acker brought me some hand-rolled cigars as a present, and while he and I were out on my deck smoking them and talking shit about the chances of the Kuseros Kemwars in the Vespers moonocky league, Tiancha was filling Kez in on the love-triangle between Acker, Tiancha, and Grace.

“Question is, if Grace is there, do either of us sit next to her,” I say. “Or are you backin’ the sista?”

Kez blinks her big blues, only a fraction smaller than Tiancha’s eyes, and wraps her arms around my waist. “Why is Tiancha my ‘sista’? Why not Grace? And why do you assume Grace is going to lose? ”

“You seemed pretty pally with Tiancha when we were at my place.” I shrug.

Slide my hands around her hips to cup her soft ass.

Mmm, that ass. We might be late to meet the rats.

“An’ I assume that Grace is going to lose for the same reason you do.

She’s not a Mod. If Acker wanted normal, he wouldn’t have shot himself up with rat DNA. ”

Kez shakes her head. That’s not how the rats are modified and Kez is educated enough to know it, despite an alleged learning disability that her siblings like to throw at her, but I haven’t seen any evidence of. “Maybe he just wants what he can’t have,” she says with a shrug. “Like all guys.”

Mmm, I wondered if the rats’ love-triangle would dredge up that bit of history.

Kez’s ex cheated on her with Kez’s best friend.

To say that betrayal left a mark on Kez is an understatement.

“Not all guys,” I say slowly. I’m always careful to correct Kez when she projects that shit on me.

I’d never cheat on my kitten; someday she’ll believe that.

“Okay, all guys but you,” she concedes.

I grunt in acknowledgement. “We’ll compare notes after.” Prurient interest in Acker’s love-life aside, if he’s going to become our go-to man on the south shore, it’d be good to understand what motivates him.

“Hey,” she says softly, focusing me on the here and now, her expressive little face looking up at me. “It’s nice, you know. Getting dressed up. Going out with you.”

I give her a squeeze. “Yeah.”

Kez and I have barely been together long enough to have a routine, much less a rut, but we don’t go out much.

In fact, we’ve only gone out three times in the time we’ve been together.

Twice to Bounce, the dance club Kez and her crew frequent, and once out drinking with Maier, who calls himself my partner, even though I don’t return the favor.

Part of why we don’t go out much is that Kez has substantial demands on her time, so carving out her nights for us to be together has been a challenge.

Another part of it is that we’ve had a bullseye on our backs from the moment we met.

We’ve had to lay low, and we’re going to have to keep laying low until I kill whoever’s put a hundred CeeBees on Kez’s head.

“After we get back from Yrillo, we’ll make this a regular thing. ”

She hugs me back. “Definitely. If I’d known how good you’d look in see-through, I’d have been showing you off up and down the Liquid Circuit.”

I shake my head. Kez knows how I look naked, likes how I look naked, and that’s all that matters. “Let’s go, kitten.”

I take her hand, and her backpack – unless we’re fighting for our lives, my kitten does not carry her own bag – and lead her off the ship.

It shifts on its presets as we ride the ramp down.

The solar sails unfurl like gigantic dragonfly wings.

Gossamer shields clink down over the cockpit and holds.

They’ll deflect anything but an E-bomb. Very good ship.

Like all rat nests, there are entrances to the Deep Whites’ domain all over Tiv.

But Kez tells me the polite way to enter is through the rats’ front door, which is in an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the Night Market.

Since this takes us right past Doc Gray’s chop-shop, that route suits me fine.

We detour quickly down an alley to Gray’s Grotto, which hasn’t officially opened yet, but is already staffed by a pretty nurse I haven’t seen before.

Probably employed with some of my credits, since Doc Gray’s had plenty of them over the last couple of weeks.

She tells me the Doc is out for a swim. I leave a message letting him know what I need and where we’ll be.

Back out in the street, the Night Market is still quiet. It’s just sunset, so the Market won’t wake up for a few hours. The rats will still be waking up with a stretch and a scratch. We’ve got time for a walk on the beach.

I’ve been on the Islands with Kez at sunset before.

But we were running away from a bunch of MAO-A cannibals at the time, so we didn’t have a chance to appreciate the view.

Now we do, and it’s a hell of a show. The sky shades from iridescent purple to burning crimson where the twin stars are swallowed by the ocean.

Rippled clouds fluoresce orange and white gold.

The cracked face of the Broken Moon peeks through the clouds. Looks like an explosion in zero-gee.

“Wow,” says Kez. “Beautiful.”

I look down at her. Her eyes are full of red and gold reflections. As she meets my eyes, her pupils dilate, the way they always do when I look at her. She smiles slowly, her face suffusing with more light than the sky.

“Beautiful,” I echo.

She knocks me with her elbow. Kez doesn’t believe she’s beautiful. I’m working on convincing her otherwise.

“Best sunset you’ve ever seen?” she asks.

I think about it for a moment. I’ve seen a lot of sunsets on a lot of worlds. But none that I’ve enjoyed more than the ones I’ve shared with her. “From my deck. Fourteen days ago.”

Kez does some mental math. Her smile turns wry and she shakes her head. “You weren’t even watching.”

“Not the whole time,” I admit. “The moonrise kept catching my eye.”

She gives me a sharper jab, since she knows I’m referring to her ass, not the Broken Moon. “Seriously.”

“Honestly, kitten, I never paid attention to sunsets before.” Which is the truth. I never bothered with sunsets or rainbows or any other natural beauty, before I met her.

She shades her eyes as she looks up into the glowing sky. “But you do now.”

“Yeah, you’re pussifying me in all sortsa ways.” That gets me a hard smack on the shoulder. I chuckle, catch her hand and reel her back into a loose embrace. “Best sunset you’ve ever seen?”

“That one two sevens ago was pretty special,” she admits. She tilts her head and regards the sky. “When I was eleven, a pair of meteors hit the Broken Moon. Bits rained down into the atmosphere for weeks.” She holds out a hand and wiggles her fingers. “It was like fireworks every night.”

“Eleven. That was a tough year for you,” I observe quietly.

I don’t want to ruin her contemplation of the sunset, but I also don’t want her to think I’m not paying attention.

Eleven was the year she was taken away from her grandmother and put into care.

The year she ran away and ended up homeless and alone on the streets of Nock.

The year her older sister abandoned her.

Kez is lucky to have survived that year.

She nods. “It wasn’t long after I went to live at the House. That’s how I got to know Liv. I’d climb up to the roof every night to watch the sky. She’d come up after she’d finished her last run. Watch with me for a while.”

Kez has mentioned her mentor, Liv, a few times before.

She sounds like a wild-child. Watching sunsets with a scared, homeless, eleven-year old girl seems a little out of character.

Makes me think that Liv was on that roof for reasons that had little to do with the sky, even if it was worth watching.

Kez looks up at me. “Where were you? Back then?”

I think back. “Sixteen years ago? I wasn’t even in this system.” I’d been with SAWL for two years. Finished basic and my sharpshooter q-course, but I hadn’t been to flight school yet. “I was probably in cold sleep. We shipped out three times that year. I spent more time frozen than I did awake.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Losin’ six weeks at a time in cold sleep? Wakin’ up in the middle of a firefight? Why the fuck would I miss that?”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not what I meant. It must have been, I don’t know, kind of glamorous. All that travel. Exotic places.”

I chuckle. “Nothin’ glamorous about the places I was sent, kitten. Gassin’ miners on Yuan who were riotin’ because the Company demanded thirty-six-hour shifts? Shootin’ down those poor fuckers on Phogath who’d gone bug nuts from light intoxication? Definitely not glamorous.”

“Oh.” Kez looks up at me for a long moment, big blues searching my face.

“What, kitten?”

“When you said you were in the military, I don’t know, I thought?—”

“What’d you think?”

She lifts her shoulder, pale skin sliding under red silk. Now that is glamorous. “I thought you’d be out there on the edge of the stars, killing aliens, or something. Making the universe a safer place.”

“Never met a xeno I didn’t like,” I say.

There’s plenty of non-terrestrial life in the galaxy.

Some of it, like the fauna on Kuseros, is only dangerous if you compete for its food source.

Some of it, like the fucking sentient crystal matrices orbiting Beta Com, can’t even recognizably interact with humans.

None of it is a serious threat to the fuck-off expansion of humanity.

Men are still the worst threat to their own kind.

“I did urban pacification, kitten. Ugly on ugly. Only good thing that came out of that time was learnin’ how to fly. ”

She smiles gently. “Well, that was a good thing.”

“Yeah, it was.” I turn her so she’s facing the sunset. Wrap my arms around her waist. Normally I’d rest my chin on the top of her head, but her heels are too high for that. I kiss the soft shag of her hair instead. “Take a last look.”

She does, and we enjoy the lightshow in silence for several minutes.

Her ability to companionably share silence is one of the things I like most about Kez.

My girl before Kez, Mouse, used to babble at me eighteen hours a day.

Every thought that went through her head.

When we were first put in together, I wanted her to open up to me.

I worked at it for days. But once she did, I fucking regretted it.

“What time is it?” Kez asks finally. She knows I have a chrono implanted in my retina. Part of a surgical Mod I had done after I broke out of Tol Seng.

“Six thirty-seven.” I translate it into civvy time for her.

“I think we should go. ”

The rats don’t seem to have a thing about time. Acker just said to come for dinner; he didn’t say when. But Kez is probably right. It’s getting on toward dinnertime, or breakfast, given that the rats are nocturnal. “Lead the way.”

She turns in my arms. Stretches up for a kiss.

Takes my hand and leads me back up the gravel beach and into a maze of buildings.

They’re shut now, displays dark, entrances shuttered, in the transition between daylight businesses and the Night Market.

Most of the buildings are acid-rain stained permacrete.

Despite the lack of distinguishing characteristics, or anything resembling a sign, Kez winds unerringly through the maze to a warehouse that looks like every other warehouse, clacks down a set of stairs to a recessed door, and knocks.

The door slides open immediately and Tiancha bows to us.

I haven’t seen her in daylight before. Although the setting sun is kind to her – gilding her brindled fur, turning her high, round ears into rose petals – she looks pretty fucking ratty.

She blinks her big black eyes into the glare of the sunset and beckons us into the shadows.