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Moaning.
Alive, she thought. The fear was back now, and the first presentiment of nausea. He was still alive. He couldn’t still be alive when the crash came. He’d had a gun. She had to find what had happened to it. With fingers quickly growing numb, she pulled the little pistol from under him.
“Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head. Even over the gambling decks, they had to have heard it. She forced herself to the metal door and checked the lock. It was bolted. Unless someone had a key or cut through it, she was all right. She could rest. They wouldn’t call the police. She hoped they wouldn’t call the police.
She slid to the floor. Sweat poured down her face and she began shaking. It seemed unfair that she’d lose time during the glorious and redemptive violence and have to fight to stay conscious through the physiological crash that followed, but she couldn’t afford to sleep. Not here. She hugged her knees to her chest, sobbing not because she felt sorrow or fear, but because it was what her flesh did when she was coming down. Someone was knocking at the door, but the sound was uncertain. Tentative. Just a few minutes, and she’d bec not all right. Not that. But good enough. Just a few minutes.
This was why glandular modification had never taken root in the military culture. A squad of soldiers without hesitation or doubt, so full of adrenaline they could tear their own muscles and not care, might win battles. But the same fighters curled up and mewling for five minutes afterward would lose them again. It was a failed technology, but not an unavailable one. Enough money, enough favors to call in, and enough men of science who had been cured of conscience. It was easy. The easiest part of her plan, really.
Her sobs intensified, shifted. The vomiting started. She knew from experience that it wouldn’t last long. Between retching, she watched the bodybuilder’s chest heaving for air through his ruined throat, but he was already gone. The smell of blood and puke thickened the air. Melba caught her breath, wiping the back of her hand against her lips. Her sinuses ached, and she didn’t know if it was from the retching or the false glands that lay in that tender flesh. It didn’t matter.
The knocking at the door was more desperate now. She could make out the voice of the fat man by the door. No more time. She took the plastic envelope and shoved it in her pocket. Melba Alzbeta Koh crawled out the window and dropped to the street. She stank. There was blood on her hands. She was trembling with every step. The dim sunlight hurt, and she used the shadows of her hands to hide from it. In this part of Baltimore, a thousand people could see her and not have seen anything. The blanket of anonymity that the drug dealers and pimps and slavers arranged and enforced also protected her.
She’d be okay. She’d made it. The last tool was in place, and all she had to do was get to her hotel, drink something to put her electrolytes back in balance, and sleep a little. And then, in a few days, report for duty on the Cerisierand begin her long journey out to the edge of the solar system. Holding her spine straight, walking down the street, avoiding people’s eyes, the dozen blocks to her room seemed longer. But she would do it. She would do whatever had to be done.
She had been Clarissa Melpomene Mao. Her family had controlled the fates of cities, colonies, and planets. And now Father sat in an anonymous prison, barred from speaking with anyone besides his lawyer, living out his days in disgrace. Her mother lived in a private compound on Luna slowly medicating herself to death. The siblings—the ones that were still alive—had scattered to whatever shelter they could find from the hatred of two worlds. Once, her family’s name had been written in starlight and blood, and now they’d been made to seem like villains. They’d been destroyed.
She could make it right, though. It hadn’t been easy, and it wouldn’t be now. Some nights, the sacrifices felt almost unbearable, but she would do it. She could make them all see the injustice in what James Holden had done to her family. She would expose him. Humiliate him.
And then she would destroy him.
Chapter Four: A
A
“Nicholas,” she said, trying to put as much warmth into her voice as she could manage. “Thank you for taking the time.”
“Nick,” he said, then sat on one of the metal chairs in front of her desk. The metal chairs were lower than her own, which gave the room a vaguely courtroom-like setting, with her in the position of judge. It was why she never sat behind the desk when meeting with one of her parishioners. There was a comfortable couch along the back wall that was much better for personal conversations and counseling. But every now and then, the air of authority the big chair and heavy desk gave her was useful.
Like now.
“Nick,” she said, then pressed her fingertips together and rested her chin on them. “Sophia came to see me this morning.”
Nick shrugged, looking away like a schoolboy caught cheating on an exam. He was a tall man, with the narrow, raw-boned look outer planets types got from hard physical labor. A
A
“She wouldn’t tell me what happened at first,” she said. “It took a while to get her to lift her shirt. I didn’t need to see the bruises, I knew they’d be there. But I did need pictures.”
When she said pictures, he leaned forward, his eyes narrowing and shifting from side to side. He probably thought it made him look tough, threatening. Instead it made him look like a rodent.
“She fell—” he started.
“In the kitchen,” A
Nick shifted in his chair, his long legs bouncing in front of him with nervous energy. His large, bony hands squeezing each other until the knuckles turned white. He wouldn’t look directly at her. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “It just happened. I could try the counseling again, I guess.”
A
His expression went hard.
“Go
“No,” A
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Do you,” she said, drawing the words out, “remember what I said would happen if you hit her again?”
He shrugged again, then pushed up out of the chair and walked away, putting his back to her. While pretending to stare at one of the diplomas hanging on the wall he said, “Why should I give a fuck what you say, Pastor A
A