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.My feet pounded the ground, my smart clothes cooled my skin, and the jammer in my pack shrouded my progress.Max registered my speed as seventy kilometers per hour.Going on foot afforded better security than a flycar; it was easier to hide a person than a vehicle.I would have to walk at least part of the way back, though.At these speeds, my body built up damage faster than my nanomeds could do repairs.Even with high-pressure hydraulics to support my augmented skeleton and a microfusion reactor to provide energy, my body couldn’t handle the stress of such speeds for long before it began to break down.It took me twelve minutes to cover fourteen kilometers.As I neared my destination, Max thought, Best to hide now.I focused my vision on a bluff ahead.How about there?Yes, that would work.Scorch is on the other side.I climbed the jagged rock formation to a cleft at the top.By wiggling through the opening on my stomach, I reached a point where I could train my spyglass on the other side of the bluff.Scorch was down there with a woman I didn’t recognize, the two of them partially hidden under an overhang mottled with blue and green mineral deposits.A flycar also waited in its shadow.Both Scorch and her companion wore clothes patterned in colors like the desert, offering yet more visual camouflage.I couldn’t hear them, either.My beetle was circling the bluff, but even this close it only managed to send me a few random words of their conversation.Easing down the bluff, I crept nearer, silent and shrouded.When I crouched in the shadow of a rock spike near the ground, I finally picked up their conversation.“…on the ship,” Scorch was saying.Her spike of hair stood up behind her ear and glistened with oil.She still had the laser carbine, which she held down at her side.“The ship is gone,” the other woman said.She looked like a drifter from the port, with her ragged jumpsuit and scuffed boots.However, she wore a top-notch shoulder holster that held a tangler snug against her body.“What about the passenger manifest?” Scorch asked.“I took care of it,” her companion said.“The manifest has his fake name.Caul Wayer.”Scorch frowned.“The name on that ID I sold him was Caul Waver.Not Wayer.”The other woman shrugged.“Waver, Wayer, the port made a mistake.Happens all the time.You’re set.”“Good.” Scorch indicated the woman’s tangler.“I’ll take that back.”Her companion pulled out the gun and tossed it to her.Scorch grabbed it out of the air, flipped it around—And shot the drifter.VIIThe CavernsOnce before, I’d seen someone die by tangler fire.It wasn’t any easier to take this time than the first.The drifter fell to the ground in a violent seizure as the shot scrambled her brain.She convulsed so hard that her body arched high off the ground.It took several minutes for her life to end, and it seemed like eternity.I didn’t realize that I’d lunged forward until my foot hit a rock and I sprawled on my stomach.The thudding of the drifter’s convulsions covered my fall; otherwise my futile attempt to stop the murder could have ended with Scorch shooting me, too.Scorch wasn’t done yet.She used the laser carbine to incinerate the drifter’s body, leaving nothing but a few ashes.Even as I watched, the breezes stirred them into the air.It wouldn’t be long before they dispersed altogether.Without a backward look, Scorch boarded the flycar.Seconds later it soared away over the desert.I didn’t move at first.When Scorch’s flyer was no longer visible in the parched sky, I walked to where the drifter had died.Most of the ashes were already gone.I clicked a hollow disk off my gauntlet and scraped a bit of the remaining powder into the container.I headed back to Cries.* * *“Message incoming,” Max said.I jerked, surfacing from the trance I had fallen into during my fourteen-kilometer hike across the Vanished Sea.I had just reached the outskirts of Cries, exhausted and numb.“Message?” I asked.“From Jak,” Max said.“Do you want to receive?”“Go ahead.”Jak’s voice growled on my gauntlet comm.“Got dinner, Bhaaj.Alone.”Damn.I had forgotten to meet him at the penthouse.“Sorry.”“Where are you?”“Muttering Lane.Near the seashore.”“Be there in—” He paused.“Three minutes.”“Thanks.”I kept walking, headed into a deserted industrial district.After a while, a sleek black hover car edged around a warehouse and settled on the cobblestones up ahead.I activated the dart thrower in my left gauntlet and kept walking.You could get a license to carry darts, which only stunned, or even a pulse gun, but not a tangler.Never a tangler.You couldn’t trace tangler shots and they made death into a slow torture.Police hated them.I hated them.Right now I didn’t like myself, either.How many people had died by Scorch’s hand because I saved her life all those years ago? And for what? So I could call in the favor decades later and figure out that she had sold or killed a Majda prince.If I had let her die, maybe Dayj would be all right.Right, I thought bitterly.If Scorch had died, someone else would have risen to fill the vacuum she left in the ugly side of the aqueducts, and I was a fool if I thought otherwise.This was what I had hated about the undercity, one of the reasons I had never wanted to come back.When Jak jumped down from the hover car, I deactivated the dart thrower.I walked up to him and put my arms around his waist.He held me, my head against his shoulder.“Want to tell me about it?” he asked.“Not now.” I let him go.“Take me home?”“Yah.”I slid into the passenger seat and he took the driver’s side.Not that it mattered where we sat; neither of us drove.He entered our destination and the car headed back to my place.Its sleek black upholstery shifted under me, trying futilely to ease the tension in my muscles.“Not hungry for dinner,” I said.Jak was watching me.“What happened, Bhaaj?”I took a breath.Then I told him.When I finished, Jak said, “You could be next.”I stared out the window at the outskirts of Cries passing below us, long stretches of stone terraces that went on and on, aesthetic and empty.I said only, “I know.”“That name, Caul Waver, it sounds like an alias.”“Apparently.” I shook myself mentally and said, “Max, any luck in finding either the name Caul Wayer or Caul Waver on the passenger manifest of any ship?”“Sorry, nothing.” His voice came out of my gauntlet comm.“The port mesh system is well-protected.”“I can have Royal check,” Jak said.I squinted at him.“Who?”“Royal Flush.”“Oh.Yah.” I’d forgotten.He had named his gauntlet EI after the legendary poker hand that earned Jak the money to start the Black Mark.He’d been training that EI for decades.It was famous.Or maybe infamous was a better word.Jak never offered its services for free.“What price?” I asked.His gaze darkened.“That you don’t get yourself killed.”I managed a smile.“Deal.”While he spoke into his comm, telling Royal what we wanted, I watched, intrigued.Jak had one of the best networks in the undercity.Rumor claimed his system was even more extensive—and more shadowy—than the Cries military network.I didn’t try to see what pass codes he entered.Honor among thieves and all.I no longer stole from anyone, and I hadn’t since I entered the army, but I never forgot the code.Jak glanced at me
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