Fiasco

Book 2: Uncharted Hearts

by Constance Fay

Genres: Action & Adventure Romance; Space Opera

Synopsis

Equal parts steamy interstellar romance and sci-fi adventure, Constance Fay's FIASCO is a perfect wild romp amidst the stars.


Cynbelline Khaw is a woman of many names. She’s Generosity, a cultist who never quite fit in. She’s Bella, the daughter who failed to save her cousin’s life. And then there’s Cyn, the notorious bounty hunter who spaced a ship of slavers.

She’s exhausted, lonely, and on her very last legs—but then a new client offers her a job she can’t refuse: a bounty on the kidnapper who killed her cousin. All Cyn has to do is partner with the crew of the Calamity, a scouting vessel she encountered when she was living under a previous alias. One tiny little issue, she’s been given an additional bounty: deliver the oh-so-compelling medic, Micah Arora, to the treacherous Pierce Family or all her identities will be revealed, putting her estranged family in danger.

Hunting a kidnapper doesn’t usually mean accidentally taking your sexy new target to dinner at your parent’s house, a local mystic predicting you’ll have an increasingly large number of children, or being accompanied by a small flying lizard with a penchant for eating metal, but, as they field investigative hurdles both dangerous and preposterous, Cyn and Micah grow ever closer. When a violent confrontation reveals that everything Cyn thought about her past is wrong, she realizes that she has the power to change her future. The first part of that is making sure that Micah Arora is around to be a part of it.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER 1

 

The Mirror is a preposterous spaceship. The soap bubble of plasglass coated with iridescent finish doesn’t look like it could survive an emergency landing, an impact with a piece of space trash, or even a kick with a moderate-weight boot. It looks like exactly what it is, the pipe dream of a society woman possessing more money than sense.

My ship—the Hermit—floats just outside radar range as I assess the points of entry to the Mirror. The bounty for Geni Etienne, recent ex-wife of Sarah Etienne, flashes on a console in my peripheral vision. This is supposed to be an easy retrieval—fools aren’t difficult to track down—and Geni is a fool if nothing else. After a mutually agreed-upon divorce, the woman got absolutely shit-faced, broke into her ex’s private dock, and stole the pleasure ship and everything within it—including Sarah’s prized genetically engineered flying lizard.

Goes to show, it never pays to trust. Either you wind up stealing a ship from your estranged lover or hiring a bounty hunter to track your lover down.

I’m Cyn Khaw, said bounty hunter.

When I get within range, the sentinel-override protocol provided to me by Sarah will deactivate the thrusters and the security system, leaving the Mirror helpless in the void. All I have to do is enter the ship, locate and restrain Geni, and plug in coordinates to take us back to Sarah Etienne’s private dock—where a tidy sum of credits awaits me. Research indicates that Geni wouldn’t know a blaster from a bouquet, so she’s unlikely to be armed or dangerous. Only vapid.

She was a foot model before she met Sarah. I’m sure a lot of foot models offer things besides excellent pedicures to society, but Geni isn’t one of them.

I should be able to take on one socialite with a grudge. I’ve certainly faced worse. You don’t work as a bounty hunter unless you’re mostly inured to violence and some kind of desperate.

I’m less inured than I’d prefer, but more desperate, so it evens out.

The desperate part will only come into play if the sentinel-override code doesn’t work. If the code doesn’t work—because Geni was unexpectedly clever enough to change it—then I have to break in. Which means I’ll set all the alarms off and lose whatever element of surprise I have.

I really hope she didn’t change the code.

I brush a hand through my newly cropped blond hair. I grew it out for my last mission—embedding with a cult on a desert planet so I could approach and retrieve one of their members for deprogramming. I managed to get her off-planet safely despite a few hiccups, including the meddling of an irritating scouting crew who insisted on trying to save me from myself.

No time for reminiscing, though—I have a bounty to retrieve.

I zip up my space suit, close the secondary-seal flap over the zipper, and slip my blaster-belt around my waist. It fastens snugly and the thigh strap ensures that nothing flies around if I go zero-g. The blaster fits perfectly in its holster and my helmet locks into place with a solid click.

A shiver works its way through me, but I shake my head once, a sharp negation of the sensation. This is a precaution. I will not be untethered in space.

I won’t.

I flex my hands in their gloves, familiarizing myself with how they slow my reflexes. I probably won’t need fast reflexes. Geni seems like the type to wallow. Probably she’s watching holos of her wedding ceremony and weeping into the scales of her ex-wife’s luxury lizard.

I nudge my ship into range, activate the sentinel override, and grimace as I wait for it to work or fail. It takes a bit. Long enough that I start to wonder how likely I am to get dead in the next few minutes. Eventually, I am rewarded by a whole array of sensors pointed at the Mirror registering dead signals and the happy green light of a successful connection on my ship’s display. Go time.

I’ve never been so happy to have a lazy bounty.

 

Instead of a boarding ramp, I have a flexible connecting tube, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’ll shoot out from my ship and, if I’m both very skilled and very lucky, will attach in a clever little airtight seal around the Mirror’s hatch. It’s only failed twice in the last standard year, which makes me fairly skilled and extraordinarily lucky.

Today is not attachment failure number three. My luck continues. The tube locks against the Mirror’s hull and the memory-metal floor stiffens to support it. With the memory-metal structure activated, the link between ships will even withstand towing force. I breathe a heavy sigh of relief that I expect to fog the faceplate even though I know my suit is calibrated to prevent that sort of thing.

I provide the verbal command to open the air lock and unholster my blaster as I step inside, thumbing down the intensity to stun because people frown on accidentally shooting holes through spaceships—or through bounties. Sarah wants her ex returned to face justice alive, not riddled with laser holes.

Who knows? After all this they may get back together. Stranger things have happened.

The air lock is larger than the one on the Hermit. No different than any other air lock, with the exception of the ridiculous crystal chandelier that some overachieving designer placed smack in the middle of the ceiling. It’s…  a choice. I close the exterior hatch behind me and cue the pressurization sequence via my backdoor remote access. As the room equalizes with the rest of the ship, I grip my blaster, preparing for a hatch to fly open and a squadron of cheaply purchased security to shoot at me and test the resiliency of my armored space suit.

It isn’t all that resilient. My credits aren’t unlimited, and I have to eat and pay off family debts as well as invest in armor. So when the door finally slides open, I’m pressed against the wall alongside it, waiting to see a blaster nose its way inside. Nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief as I step out of the lock. Still nothing.

Maybe this job will actually be as easy as it seems.

The ship continues its ludicrous opulence on the inside. An opalescent sheen coats the rounded white walls, ceiling, and floor. I’m sure everyone likes living inside an iridescent egg. I don’t know why people say the wealthy are out of touch with the common person. Seems totally normal and easy to keep smudge-free.

At first, I think the ship is filled with surreal sculptures. A collection of spindly legged half-hatched shells perch in a corner, gleaming in the golden ambient light. Fragile scales line a wall, flaring at waist height.

It’s furniture. Wildly impractical furniture that will break the second you try to use it, but furniture, nonetheless.

I creep through the quiet ship, blaster out, waiting for someone to pop out and try to murder me. According to the schematics Sarah provided, the orb is subdivided on the inside. The hall I’m following now should open on a large central chamber that mirrors the shape of the ship itself. Three bedrooms surround the central chamber, and a staircase winds its way around the dome to a hatch in the top that accesses the helm. I came in via the hold, which is beneath the central chamber—and large enough to contain a small personal vessel as well as random supplies. A backup chandelier, maybe?

Good design if you want your ship to be difficult to secretly infiltrate. Rotten design if you’re the secret infiltrator.

Essentially, I must traipse through this whole vessel just to steal it. Rude.

As I approach the central chamber, noises start to filter into the hall. Wet smacking noises. The kind that are only fun to hear if they’re coming from you and even then not if you stop and really listen to them. It appears Geni has moved on romantically. I calculate the odds that I get all the way up that staircase while they’re distracted and I come up short. By the pace of the panted breaths, this little interlude is nearing its climax. Pun intended.

I hate to kill the mood. Then again, people are rarely armed while in the heat of the moment, so they’re less likely to kill me in retaliation. Besides, if I wait around, it smacks of voyeurism, and I really don’t want anyone to think I was creepily watching them prior to making a capture. Despite the oxygenated ship, I keep my face mask down as I round the corner, blaster raised, and nearly shit myself.

Geni has, indeed, moved on. She’s presently moving on a prone male form, hands in her hair like she’s posing for an advertising campaign instead of enjoying herself. That’s not why panic is poking little spines into my guts. It’s who she’s moving on. Carmichael Pierce. Not the current Pierce in charge, which would be catastrophic, but his heir, which is just short of catastrophic. Carmichael works as his father’s head of security, which means me popping up will be extra humiliating. He is the face of the Pierce Family, their bright new future.

I guess all that luck had to run out sometime.

Also, this is a very stupid choice for Geni if her goal is to remarry rather than just get her rocks off. Someone placed that highly can’t afford to marry someone like her who doesn’t bring any political clout. Pierce has their hands in all sorts of quasi-legal shit and makes alliances to keep it on the quasi side rather than fully illegal. If it’s energy, its pulse is Pierce. Solar, wind, nuclear, atomic, algae, fission, or anything else.

They’ve gobbled up star systems like a particularly gluttonous stray cat does mice. At this point, Pierce territory includes eight star clusters, at least thirty additional planets of value, one binary system, a research pulsar, and approximately two-fifths of the trading lanes. Maybe three-fifths now that Nakatomi is gone. And I have to interrupt his sexy-time to serve a warrant.

No one likes that. Powerful people even less than normal people, I imagine.

Pierces are brutal, ruthless, and—apparently—quite well-endowed, which I discover when Carmichael tosses Geni from his lap to the plushly upholstered bench seating—in an iridescent white, of course—and reaches for a blaster that’s been left on a side table. His hair is long, wavy, and blond. His eyes are dark. His face is rodenty despite the clear signs of facial surgery that arched his cheeks, strengthened his chin, and angled his jaw. Something about the eyes and the shape of his nose, maybe.

I put on my big-bad-bounty-hunter voice. It’s mostly my normal voice but less scared sounding. “That would be a bad idea. My bounty is for everything present except you, Carmichael. Geni Etienne, formerly and soon to be Geni al Astal, there is an open warrant for you in Pierce-Etienne border territory and I’ve been contracted to retrieve you. If you come with me without resistance, no harm will come to you.”

I’m smart enough to not give my name. Families love to hold grudges but there are a lot of bounty hunters out there. I sidle to the side table and retrieve Pierce’s blaster, tucking it in my belt.

Geni grumbles under her breath like I’m an inconvenient paparazzi. Her blue-greenish hair is still perfectly styled, draping over her shoulder. As I watch, the roots shift to a brilliant magenta that slowly makes its way down the rest of her strands. Optical-coating dye. No wonder her hair stayed in place. Her eyes are wide, hazel, and lacking intelligence. “What is it going to cost to make you go away?”

I kick the pile of clothes slightly closer to them. No need to do this naked. We can all be civilized. I don’t want to stun-blast them. For one thing, sometimes stunning has side effects. For another, stunning a Pierce would embarrass him, and embarrassing a Pierce is a great way to inspire him to make my life a living hell.

“Keep your hands in view as you dress.” I snap the command while keeping my distance across the room. “You seem to be unclear about how bounty hunting works. I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the glamour.”

“Glamour?” Her lip curls. “I can give you glamour. I can get you admittance to all the best social clubs. Esoterica. Makewells. Thorn and—”

“Who would even want to go to a social club? What do you do there? Drink? Hobnob? Socially hit people with actual clubs?” I shake my head. It says something about Families that her only thought of glamour is some sort of location where people can view her being fancy. Also, she can’t recognize a joke. “Carmichael Pierce, you are free to leave the ship in your own vessel. The Mirror and its contents are owned by Sarah Etienne and shall be returned to her.”

Please just leave the ship. It’s easy. Take the easy way.

He doesn’t take the easy way.

Carmichael lunges at me with arms spread and I stun him with a shot to the torso. He flops on the floor like a dropped pile of laundry. Only without any clothes. So, I guess, the opposite of a pile of laundry.

Geni squeaks.

I’m far too professional to squeak. My nervous panic is on the inside because I just shot a naked Carmichael Pierce and watched him helplessly flop on the floor, and now I’m going to have to restrain him. A hidden security force would have been better because security forces, like me, are nobodies. No one gets upset if you stun them and they usually understand that the job comes first.

Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck.

Yes, this is Etienne business, but that’s like trying to explain to a tornado that you just had an earthquake so it will have to try again later. It doesn’t give a fuck. I just shot a human tornado, and he probably bruised his very exposed winky when he fell on it.

I’m so screwed.

Instead of pacing frantically trying to figure out what to do, I turn to face Geni. I toss a pair of plastic tie cuffs to the floor. “Put the cuffs on him. Nice and tight.”

When she’s done locking Pierce’s wrists behind his back, I throw her another pair of the cuffs. “Get dressed, then cuff yourself.”

“You k-killed him.” She’s crying, or at least that’s what she wants me to think she’s doing. No actual tears, which ruins the effect. She’s complying with my requests, though, which is what I really care about. She spends an inordinate amount of time fussing with her collar for a woman who’s headed to prison for spaceship theft.

“I didn’t kill him. Why would I ask you to restrain him if I killed him? He’s stunned. He’ll be just fine in a couple minutes.”

Probably.

After scanning the room for possible weapons, I drape a blanket over Pierce, raise my face shield at last, and search the rest of the ship. The ship is even more blindingly white without the slight tint of the face shield filtering the light. No other living creatures are present except a chubby winged lizard, small enough that I could hold it with both hands cupped, in a cage in one of the bedrooms. It gnaws on the drool-coated bars of its cage. The aforementioned pet of Sarah’s. Something smells like sulfur and, when I approach the cage, I see that slivers of metal have been pared off the bars. Flakes of it decorate tiny fangs and the lizard belches at me. A spark flies out.

Well. That’s a wildly impractical creature to bring on a spaceship. I stow Pierce’s blaster on a shelf behind the cage, because if I keep it stuck in my belt, I’ll probably shoot myself in the butt.

“I’m here to take you back to your mom,” I tell the lizard. It belches again and sticks out a narrow, forked tongue. I’m going to assume that means “yay.”

It’s kind of cute. Reddish-gold scales near its spine fade to brass on its belly. Small, diaphanous bronze wings are folded tightly against its back. Brilliantly golden eyes. Black gums, which I see when it bares its teeth at me. I bare mine back. The bars look like they’ll hold for a while yet, so I leave the lizard where it is and turn to the main area.

A fist comes out of nowhere and nails me directly in the nose. I stagger backward, stars pinwheeling in front of my eyes, and reflexively snap a kick to my left. I hit something, but not hard enough to stop a second blow that strikes the edge of my helmet rather than my face. I fall back against the doorframe, trying frantically to get my head back in the game, except my head is exactly the problem. You don’t quickly bounce back from getting hit in the face unless you’re a professional actor.

Because they don’t actually get hit in the face.

Since my brain isn’t working well enough to target anything, I focus on moving. I push off the doorframe just in time to avoid a third strike. Carmichael Pierce’s fist batters into the metal frame as I dodge away, hand fumbling for my holster and my blaster.

How did he get untied? How did he wake up so quickly? Apparently I didn’t hear him escaping or putting his pants on. Bad day for me. A stun round takes someone out for at least half a standard hour. He was out for ten minutes max. As I backpedal, I shoot a glance at Geni. Still sitting on the white furniture, restrained, watching us like we’re an action holo. She didn’t free him.

I may be wearing a space suit, but I’m a moderately sized woman and Pierce is a large man. Space suits are made to stop the cold or the heat—not fists. Also, he keeps aiming for my face, which isn’t protected at all. I’m built and trained for ambushes, not brawls. Priap must have had a hidden blade nearby to cut his wrist ties—maybe even subdermal.

He is a chief of security, after all—I should have considered who I was dealing with. I backpedal for a moment, trying to buy time. I don’t feel bad for stunning him anymore. But I’m a little concerned that stunning him may not be enough. Legally I’m allowed to kill while retrieving a bounty. A normal person, that is. If I kill a Pierce, his Family will come at me with everything they have, leaving me a little smudge on the ground. So I can’t shoot him and I’m not going to win a hand-to-hand fight against someone twice my size who’s literally been training his entire life and is acknowledged as the best in his Family, despite his rodent-like features.

I raise my blaster, but he knocks it out of my hand in a high kick that would make me applaud if my fingers weren’t spasming in pain. The blaster goes spinning and we both lunge toward it. I manage to sidestep a thrown elbow, capturing his forearm and ducking behind him to lock it behind his back. I force Pierce to his knees for a split second, spinning him away from the blaster, but I don’t even have time to celebrate before he bounds back up, other arm reaching back over his head to snag my suit and throw me forward over his shoulder.

I grab his ear as I fly over his head.

He screams, latching on to my wrist and, as I fall back toward him I do it elbow first. My elbow digs into his neck, but I sacrificed a graceful landing for a violent one and I crash to the floor on my back immediately after. Which turns out to be a bad location, because he manages to get to his feet before I do and kicks me in the ribs while I’m attempting to rise.

I hit the sofa, shoving it slightly forward, but manage to throw myself up and over it, putting the furniture between us. Geni moves toward the blaster out of the corner of my eye, and I bark a commanding “No” at her.

Wonder of all wonders, she listens and stops moving.

“Dumb bitch.” Carmichael grunts at me as he leaps on top of the sofa like an absolute moron instead of walking around it. He clearly doesn’t even think he needs my blaster to take me out. Which is presumptuous.

So instead of kicking him, I kick the sofa with everything I have. It slides back, knocking him against the wall, and I sprint back for my blaster. His heavy footsteps come from behind me. I stumble and dive for it, my fingers reaching for the grip just as his own fingers wrap around my ankle.

I kick him in the face. He grunts and his fingers relax just enough for me to wriggle free and finally reach the blaster. He approaches from behind, his shadow falling over me where I stretch on the floor.

I twist and point the blaster.

I can’t afford the kind of enemy that he presents. I want him to forget me as soon as possible. Any smart person would. But I guess I’m not that smart of a person because instead of trying to cajole him or smooth over the situation I sneer up at his standing form, blaster steady. “Try it.”

He blinks, a trail of blood dribbling into his eyes. “You’re Cyn Khaw.”

Carmichael says my name like it’s a profanity and I feel a momentary rush of pride that my reputation is such that a Pierce recognizes me. It’s immediately followed by a rush of abject terror because, if he knows me, he’ll be able to track me down later. “You’re that bounty hunter. The one who spaced that whole ship full of traffickers.”

I adore it when people bring up that part of my history. It certainly wasn’t an incredibly scarring moment in my life that I revisit every time I close my eyes to sleep. Some people, people like Carmichael, love my story. As though what I did wasn’t awful. As though it was impressive somehow.

It was impressive, just not in the way they think.

“You’re a monster.” He says it in an admiring way, like how you’d say “goddess.” “I always wanted to meet you.”

I stun him. Don’t even think about it. It’s deeply stupid of me, but why stop being deeply stupid now?

He hits the ground with a thud. Stunned again for whatever brief period of time he stays out. Not dead. I confirm by checking his pulse. I force myself to my hands and knees, breath panting and fingers shaking as adrenaline shoots through me like a comet.

Geni is half-twisted off the furniture trying to get away from me, still in her restraints. She looks at me, aghast. Like I’m the monster he named me. I point a shaking finger at her. “Don’t fucking test me, Geni. We’re here because you got greedy and couldn’t get divorced like a normal person. You want to go boff a Pierce, have at it. But don’t steal your wife’s property when your prenup makes it clear it isn’t yours. Especially don’t steal her pet. Which, by the way is eating through that cage, you imbecile.”

Her lower lip quivers and big fat teardrops pool in her eyes. Her voice breaks when she speaks. “She was so mean to me.”

Maybe she was. None of my business. I’m not here to be a good guy, I’m here to enforce the law and defend my client.

I shrug—wince when it pulls at something stiff—and restrain Pierce myself this time, running my thumb over the skin of his wrists to check for a subdermal blade. He doesn’t have one. He somehow snapped the ties. My credits are on some sort of strength mods, but it could be something far less common. I didn’t notice it with his first strike but the thing about getting hit in the face is that it always hurts. I feel a little better about my lack of resiliency in this fight. To be safe, I put ten ties on him this time, loop some expanding ties around his torso and upper arms to confine him even more, and drag him into one of the side bedrooms. Not the one with the lizard and his old blaster. The furniture is all attached to the wall, and I remove anything that he could use to fashion a weapon. This time, I don’t give him a blanket to protect his decency because the “what if I accidentally humiliate a superinfluential man” portion of the evening has come and gone long ago.

Geni falls into a sulky silence. Perhaps because she’s considering her bad life choices. More likely because I let my hand drop to the blaster when she opens her mouth. I could stun her, too. It would probably make things easier. Instead, I lock her in one of the other rooms and confiscate her coms and datapad.

The ultimate punishment.

I take the ridiculous winding stair around the perimeter of the room until I reach the door in the ceiling that allows access to the helm. The dark void stretches over the semitransparent dome that covers the helm. I dial in the coordinates to head back to Sarah’s dock in Etienne territory and activate the autopilot in the Hermit to follow the same trajectory.

My next stop is the room with the lizard. It’s nibbled through two bars and has its head nearly all the way through, jaws working in the air as it strains for freedom. I retrieve Pierce’s blaster from the shelf behind the cage and put it back in my belt. Better to keep it on me, it seems.

“Are you going to bite me?” I ask the lizard, reaching for the cage door. It makes a little whirring sound. Doesn’t sound bitey— which is a thought that a lot of people probably have right before they get bitten. I let the lizard out and it extends its crumpled wings and executes an awkward flight to my shoulder, where tiny golden claws dig into my space suit. Tiny enough that they shouldn’t impact suit integrity.

I tentatively reach a gloved hand up and scratch the scales beneath its chin. It makes that whirring sound again. Still no biting. It also doesn’t seem inclined to go its own way, so I move around the ship carrying the lizard like a mobile accessory.

Eventually, I tug a section of the bench seat in front of the door to the room Pierce is locked in and sit down on the floor, back against the bench. I let my head drop back onto it. He knows who I am.

I am so screwed. Again. Some more.

A smiling holo of Sarah and Geni rotates slowly in the corner. They look happy. I wonder if they were, or if it was just for the picture. I have the same kind of holos of my family. We were happy in them. Big grins all around. The holos still have the grins even though the real ones have faded. It’s like looking through a window to the past, and most of the time, the past hurts.

They don’t smile at me anymore but at least most of their bills are paid. They have a roof over their heads thanks to the work I do that they’ll never know about. They think I’m a private investigator, working a series of small-time cases to find missing baubles. They’d be horrified to know what I really do.

The lizard bites my ear. I sigh and scratch its chin again.

Without a doubt, nothing good comes from trusting. Someone always winds up bloody.

 

CHAPTER 2

 

The sodium-yellow tunnel lights slant at an angle through the small high windows to my office. If I stood on a box to look outside—or opened the door—I’d see polished taupe rock and a selection of storefronts, connected via metal walkways, bridges, and even one or two zip lines. I don’t know what dummy thought that fast-track zip lines were a convenient way to get from one side of the Burren to the other, but all they managed to do was create a hazard of flying bodies in the midst of low-budget squalor.

The Burren does squalor well. It’s a small space under the surface of a domed moon that orbits Zed-7. The underground scrubbers recycle the atmosphere, and the heaters bring the rock up to habitable, if not comfortable. It’s dark, dirty, and desperate, but for all that, it has a certain charm. The sort of overemphasized personal brightness that comes from having dark surroundings. Since the only material around to work with is stone, sculptures ranging from smooth and abstract to rough-hacked and lewd bedeck the space between shops and homes. The ceiling of the Burren is painted like what someone imagined a planet’s sky would look like.

For all I know, there is a planet with a sky like that—bright yellow-red and traced with purply clouds. I’d like to see it in real life.

I lean back in my chair, stretching my arms over my head and wait for the vibration on my interface tattoo to tell me that my dinner has been delivered. If I don’t open the door immediately, someone’s going to run off with it. The lizard chitters. Yes, I still have the lizard. Sarah insisted. She said she couldn’t look at it without thinking of Geni’s betrayal and that it liked me more than it had ever liked her. More likely, she didn’t realize that it has the capacity to gnaw through the bars of any humane cage she purchases.

It feels like a consolation prize, a little perk to make up for the fact that Carmichael Pierce is about to destroy my life.

“Its name is Vuur,” Sarah told me while shoving the creature into my hands. It squirmed. “Give it a good home. I have to go on a retreat. Clean my psyche. Drop off the radar.”

She’s terrified of Carmichael, too. Smarter than I thought she was.

So now I have a Vuur. I pet the lizard on its chin, and it takes a delicate bite out of the metal hoop in my ear.

A key piece of information that Sarah forgot to share: it doesn’t just gnaw on metal, it eats metal. Like, to stay alive. I knew it had a penchant for chewing on bars but why someone would genetically alter a being to eat hull material and then stick said being inside a spaceship is mind-boggling. It’s already put bite marks in half of my weapons. I had to barter with the foundry down the street for bags of scrap metal.

I would have said I wasn’t a pet type of person. I’d have been wrong. The little brat is endearing.

My office is no-frills. A desk, a holo podium, two chairs with a plas-synth coating. The original coating peeled off and I’ve patched it with available scraps from the market. They look kind of jaunty in a mismatched sort of way. A collection of twisted-twine flowers in yellow and pink, made and painted by my cousin Aymbe when she was ten and I was fifteen, long before she was abducted and murdered and my family fractured. I haven’t seen twine-art with a weave this intricate outside the trawlertown where I grew up. They’re a sliver of home—unique and individual—and they are strewn over the top of the small chipped dresser that holds my clothing. I straighten one of the stems and a fleck of paint chips off. Aymbe always wanted to leave the trawlertown, to see the galaxy. At least some little part of her managed it.

A heavy punching bag that’s also patched in so many places it’s more patch than bag rounds out the decorations in the main room.

That’s about all there is to see except for the small bathroom and the soundproofed windowless closet in the back with a fold-down bed for when I can’t put off sleep any longer. I’ve gotten good at avoiding it but stims only last for so long. The closet door locks. A lot. More locks than you could imagine a door would have. It’s probably more secure than the Burren credit union’s vaults. The room is a retrofitted panic room and is the whole reason I bought this place. You could break into the main office equipped with nothing more than strong intentions, but it would take a team of experts to enter my bedroom. The coverlet on the bed is rosy pink, which would surprise anyone who knows the public face of Cyn Khaw. Generally, notorious vigilante murderers don’t have fluffy pink beds. At least, not the kind of vigilantes in the holos.

Luckily, no one here knows my real name. I’ve got a bad reputation. It doesn’t make for good neighbors. My neighbors know me as C, which doesn’t stand out at all somewhere like the Burren where anonymity is the rule, not the exception.

The interface tattoo on my wrist vibrates, a small signal rippling up my forearm and down into my hand. Dinner has arrived. I set Vuur on my desk with a command to leave my datapad alone. It immediately ignores that command and starts to gum the corner of the device. They could have engineered it with brains in addition to looks. I guess lizards aren’t known for their smarts.

With a sigh, I dredge into the pouch on my hip for a flake of brass—lizard-nip—and toss it. Vuur clumsily catches it in midair and plops down to the desk in a slump, licking its teeth. I swing open my door just in time to watch a black cat dodge away from the noodle box with an overly innocent look on its face and a tourist scream by on a zip line.

“These zip lines are better than the holos.” The craggy voice comes from next door, and I glance over to see Madrigal Alvarez sitting in a folding chair on the stoop of the retirement home, a foil bag of scallion-and-sardine-flavored chips resting on her lap. Madrigal pops a chip in her mouth with pleasure and offers me the bag. A brindled cat sitting on the edge of her stoop watches the motion with intense focus.

“I don’t know how you can digest those.” I wince, crouching down and picking up my red glossy box of noodles. “The last time you talked me into them, my breath smelled like dead fish for a month. Where do you even find them?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she says, patting the bag with a satisfied smile. I really would. Madrigal is awfully well-connected for an elderly lady confined to the house next door. “How can you eat those noodles every night?”

I pull the door shut behind me and sit outside, perched on the low wall that lines the front of my office, leaning against a support post as I unfold the lid of the noodle box. They coil within like greasy threads coated in garlic and axiole spice. Delicious. The two-pronged fork that comes with them is perfectly sized to twirl the larger noodles or scoop the smaller. “They have everything a woman can want: protein, carbs, veggies, dirt-cheapness.”

“You’re gonna get an ulcer.” Madrigal eats a few more chips.

I shrug and scoop up some noodles. The stale-dirt tang of the axiole—or potentially the actual stale dirt that filters down from above—adds a thickness and complexity to the flavor. The yellow light makes Madrigal’s skin look like crumpled brown paper. In better lighting, she’d be a beauty but that would be hard to find in the Burren. Her hair is in a thick steely knot at the back of her neck and her dress is a vibrant red. The little black cat creeps closer. I dredge out a chunk of some form of meat—better not to ask questions—wipe off the sauce, and toss it to the feline. She catches it in the air and devours it quickly with loud smacking noises.

“Howsit?” I keep shoveling down the noodles.

Madrigal shrugs. “Same as always. You’re starting to look like a person again.”

“As opposed to—?”

“A lady doesn’t say what you looked like before.” She pauses like she’s considering the statement. “A fucking shipwreck.”

I snort out a laugh. I didn’t look that bad. I bruised for a day or so, but I heal fast. My chin-length blond hair is tightly braided in three tracks down my scalp. My pale brown eyes are unshadowed because I slept two days ago.

My mother’s skin tans dark, and her hair is black as the pit at the edge of the Burren, but the one banished Pierce ancestor long ago on my father’s side dominates the genetic profile. They built their aesthetic to last. It’s a shame. I’ve always wanted my mother’s petite height and delicate bone structure. Her warm skin.

I could be so much sneakier if I were built like her. This hair makes me stand out like a docking beacon and it repels hair dye. Damn Pierce geneticists. Talk about hubris.

“Glad to hear you didn’t become a lady while I was gone.” I scoop out some more noodles. “Are you free to play Hanjong later tonight?”

“No time like the present.” She pulls the board from alongside her seat, and a pang of sympathy ripples through me. Madrigal is essentially trapped in the home, surrounded by people in a state of decline or inconsistency. I’m the only one she can play Hanjong with because I’m the only one both willing and capable. She still has at least one person on the outside. Someone keeps her supplied with things, but that’s not the same as company.

She has never admitted it, doesn’t have to, but rumor has it that Madrigal Alvarez used to run the Stix, the gang that operates every illicit smuggling activity that touches the gravity well of Zed-7 and has their tentacles in every way station and port in Pierce space. This crime maven brought the board outside, on the off chance that I would be free. Eager for the opportunity to connect.

I must remind myself that, while my lack of friends is by choice—or my basic personality—hers is by circumstance. The noodles turn sour in my stomach, and I drop the box on my stoop for the cat. She warily sniffs my fingers but won’t let me come any closer than that. I understand her feelings. Trust doesn’t come easily for me, either. I toe the box closer to her. Once she’s fed, I leap the gap between balconies to the retirement home and settle in the chair across from my friend.

I haven’t told Madrigal about the mission that left me bruised. About how Carmichael recognized me. Because that would mean telling her about the real me. The girl who fled her loving family and beautiful planet over ten years ago, saying it was in search of vengeance for her murdered cousin. Really it was because I couldn’t stand the eyes of my family, the expectation that I would save everyone by marrying a nice boy and having half a dozen chubby babies to crawl around my mother’s kitchen.

I mean, it was also vengeance. I can multitask that much.

“What ever happened to that boy who was floating around your office? That one with the burly build and moony eyes?” Madrigal’s not really asking. This is tactics. She wants to distract me from the game.

“Nothing happened,” I mutter, moving a piece. And it’s the truth.

“That’s disappointing.”

“Not really.” I don’t do romance. Moony-eyed or not, that boy was not ready for the full Cyn Khaw show. It’s aggressive, obsessed, driven, and an absolute mess. I’ve pared my life down enough that it’s basically sustenance. Everything I have goes to my family or my hunt. I may track people for a living, but there’s only one who matters. One whom I’ve been after my whole adult life. The Abyssal Abductor.

“Disappointing,” she repeats, knocking one of my pieces off the board. It skitters toward the pit at the edge of the porch but is batted back at us by the cat. I pick it up.

If I told anyone who I was, it would be Madrigal. Which would mean ruining our pleasant evening-board-game tradition with the truth. Any minute now Carmichael Pierce will be breaking down my office door, smashing to pieces this small life I’ve built in the Burren, cutting off the trickle of money I send home to my family.

Pierce will come after me, I rationalize, not my neighbors, which means I don’t need to tell her for her own safety. It’s just my own selfishness that makes me want to talk to someone, to get a sympathetic ear.

Also, I’m pretty sure she already knows who I am. It’s a game we play. I pretend she’s a kooky old lady instead of a dangerous crime boss, and she pretends I’m a down-on-her-luck PI instead of a notoriously deadly bounty hunter. I sometimes pretend that half, too.

But I could be wrong. Maybe she doesn’t know and then why should I burden her with the truth? I look forward to our games. Tonight, I win two and Madrigal wins three. I’d like to pretend I threw the last one to her to make her feel good, but she cut me off at the ankles and then spent some time luxuriating in my defeat before putting me out of my misery. The woman’s a barbarian. When I finally jump back to my own balcony, my shoulders are relaxed for the first time in days, and I feel the pleasant numbness of sleepiness. Perhaps I won’t even need the soundproofing in my room tonight. Perhaps I’ll sleep peacefully until morning.

There’s a first time for everything.

I wave good night—it is what passes for night in the Burren, the sodium lights dimmed long ago—scoop up the messy remains of my dinner, and enter my office. Vuur is curled in a little ball on my desk. I scoop it up, tracing a finger along the rough line of scales that mark its spine, and stare at the winking notice of new messages on my datapad. There’s always more work to be done. Always new leads.

It doesn’t occur to me that they may be social messages. I speak to my family once a standard month. I call them. They never call me. They did, early on, but there were too many missed connections. Too many times when I got the scent of the Abyssal Abductor and pursued it at the expense of everything else.

The literal expense. I unplug the lamp because the switch doesn’t work anymore and I can’t afford to replace it. The lizard huffs out a hot breath on my fingertips. It looks peaceful. I ignore the messages and retreat to my bed. I sleep for a full two hours. Not bad.

In the morning, the lights flare before setting at a level that most would call murky. Half the day passes where I visit the local constabulary androids and check the bounty screens for new jobs. Nothing worth the effort it would take to fetch them. Two of the screens are broken, the familiar shape of a fist starbursting shards over the display. Someone wrote fuck pierce on the third, but I can see through the paint enough to determine that the jobs posted wouldn’t pay for a new lamp, much less rent.

---

When I get back to my office, someone is sitting in my chair, her back turned to me, impeccable black hair twisted into a chic style that screams money. If she still looks like money after traveling the Burren, it implies she has as much if not more power. A large bag rests at her side, lid open, weighed down with what appears to be nothing at all. When I open the door, she doesn’t turn to look at me. Instead, her head angles subtly toward my job board, where I track my trickiest bounties. There has only been one bounty featured there for years.

Vuur perches on the back of my desk chair watching her with wary avarice, little lizard eyes adhered to her jewelry. The mere fact that it is alive tells me that it hasn’t made an attempt at a nibble yet. Whoever the woman is, I’m betting she takes no prisoners. She doesn’t have the coloring of a Pierce and that’s all that has kept me from stunning her in the back, rescuing the lizard, and fleeing for my life. I sidle around the room until I can see her better.

“That’s an impressive background you’ve put together, Cyn Khaw. Rather primitively assembled, though.” The subtle high-class accent added to the posture that says that she could buy and sell not only me but the entire Burren several times over tells me everything I need to know about who this is. I complete my sidle and stand on the opposite side of my desk, getting the full effect of all that Family intensity. Estella Escajeda, in my office.

I’ve seen her on the holos because she’s fucking famous. Hard to believe someone my age would be this powerful.

This can only end poorly. At least I haven’t embarrassed this one while naked yet.

“You’ve come a long way to insult my methods. If you’d have made an appointment, perhaps I would have thrown a sheet over it to protect your delicate sensibilities.” I don’t know why the heir to the Escajeda Family is in my office. I don’t want to know. Working for Families is bad business. I made an exception for Etienne and look where that got me.

Belatedly, I realize she called me Cyn instead of C. Of course she did. She’s so powerful that aliases are probably meaningless if she really cares to investigate. Now two heirs know who I am. A month ago, the number was zero. I preferred that number.

I experience a moment of panic where I wonder if she’s here because of what happened with Carmichael. Pierce and Escajeda are rivals. They’d never work together, but I wouldn’t put anything past them. I’m a tool to people like Estella.

Estella coolly assesses me from eyes so deep a brown they’re almost black. The artful sweep of her lashes is accentuated with very little cosmetic assistance. Her face has the smooth flawlessness of a sex robot and half the personality. In their quest for perfection, Families have left character in the dust. At least in my opinion.

A little weathering tells the kind of life you’ve led. My family’s skin screams of the sun of Ginsidik, their hands pattered with the telltale scars of a life at sea. Wrinkles indicate if they smile, squint, or frown. Estella’s face offers no such map. Expressions slip off it like water. The subtle glimmer of some sort of implant flashes inside the shadow of her ear. Coms are usually either more understated or more obvious than that. I can’t figure out what it is, which means it’s probably something deeply interesting.

I poke my finger in the apparently empty bag as I pass it. My skin brushes complicated folds of fabric. Well, shit. That explains how she got here without a trail of holo paparazzi. It doesn’t explain why she’d use something as expensive and precious as nullifying fabric to move through a location like the Burren. Nullifying fabric fools the eyes, but more importantly, it also fools cameras— even heat-sensing systems. It isn’t invisible, but it blocks signals, so it shows up as a blank point. If any constabulary androids are monitoring feeds, they’ll know someone snuck around but they’ll have no clue who.

The engineer from the ship I encountered on Herschel Two had something similar—the cheaper version that would fool the eye but probably not a lens. I’m not an expert, but it wasn’t the kind of ship that would have much of anything expensive on it.

I could almost wish I had the toys of a Family. Almost. But they come with a price. If I was in a Family, there would probably be a reality holo about my escapades—casting them as noble or diabolical depending on who was airing it. People would know who I am.

Awful.

“If I had made an appointment, there would be a record of my presence.” As Estella speaks, I notice a faint whisper of a line by the corner of her eyes. The beginning of a furrow in her brow. Not enough to mar the impression of exquisite regularity in her visage, but enough that it’s clear an actual emotion is trying—and failing—to break through. That, more than anything else, tells me this is a crisis of epic proportions. You don’t get an emotion out of a Family scion unless it’s a world-ending moment. “Also, your reputation leads me to believe that you would have refused to meet with me.”

I snort. The sound floats through the room with all the elegance of a cat fart. At least she admits it. It’s enough to get me seated facing her. Vuur creeps from the back of the chair to my shoulder, nuzzling its nose under my ear in what could be a gesture of affection but could also be sniffing my earring. “With your Family’s resources, I would anticipate that you could hire anyone in charted territory. What brings you to my door?”

Her mouth presses into a thin line. “My Family’s resources will not be involved in this particular retrieval. They can’t be.”

That quickly, I want to know everything about it. Stupid curiosity. I just can’t be presented with a question and leave it unanswered. My mother always said a curious serpent winds up as dinner. She has a lot of sayings about serpents. “I assume someone’s resources will be involved.”

“I have investments of my own. But that won’t matter. This job, you’d do for free.” Her face is so motionless it could be steel. Like she’s bottled up tight as a vault.

A hollow pit opens within my stomach. There’s only one job I’d do without pay. The hunt I’ve failed over and over for almost half my life. The person who took my cousin and never brought her home.

“The Abyssal Abductor has taken another ransom. Her clock started two days ago.”

She’s right. I’d do this one for free.

The Abyssal Abductor is a serial kidnapper who has plagued this system for nearly twenty years. In his early years, he aimed small— targeting young children of ordinary families, demanding thousands of credits. In recent years, he’s moved on to stealing more wealthy children for millions of credits, and he’s doing it more frequently. He can’t actually need credits anymore, which means, I guess, that he’s just doing it for the joy of crime. He’s escalating, though. Which means that he’s more dangerous than ever.

The Abductor is still fair, in a way. If you pay his ransom, he returns the child unharmed. Usually they’ve been locked in a VR pod the entire time, barely aware they were kidnapped because of their virtual adventure. Merciful. Or maybe just convenient.

The problem comes when families can’t or won’t pay the ransom. That’s happened four times. We were the first and I know firsthand what results from failure. He made a mistake when he took Aymbe. We weren’t wealthy by our planet’s standards. My father and mother were both machinists and musicians. My grandfather a blacksmith. Hard workers who lived comfortably, but hardly rich. I couldn’t figure out why he’d take Aymbe over the mayor’s son, or one of the algae processing supervisors’.

We didn’t have many credits to our name. Half the work on the trawler is done on barter. People don’t keep credits handy. We borrowed heavily to make the ransom and my father and uncle went to make the drop. Unfortunately, none of us, Abductor included, accounted for the weather. The storm that hit their ship killed my uncle and every single credit we’d saved was lost to the sea—the Abductor insists on a hard credit drop. Banks make things too easy to trace.

A kidnapped child is useless if there’s no ransom to be had. I lost my uncle and my cousin in one fell swoop. Then I lost the rest of my family because that sort of thing either binds you together or breaks you apart.

We didn’t go the good way.

“Why is the Escajeda heir approaching me about this in secret?” I might take this case for free, for vengeance, for justice, for heroism or guilt—but I’m not an idiot. Something is off. If it’s public knowledge that the Abductor is on the prowl again, it would be in the feeds, all over the ether. It isn’t.

Also, why me? I’ve made a stir at several ransom recoveries—I’ve been closer than anyone else at catching the Abductor, but I always made sure I was gone before any reporters showed up. “How do you even know where to find me?”

I’ve done my best to keep that private. Having a secret identity only works if it’s an actual secret.

“No information is a secret if a Family wants it. Your identity wasn’t protected because you were cautious. It was protected because no one important cared.” Her voice is clipped. Impatient.

“That’s rude for someone who just suggested that I work for free. I’m suddenly feeling very expensive.” Vuur’s claws dig through my jacket, maybe sensing my offense. Maybe telling me to shut my mouth. Probably that one. I reach for professionalism. It’s a stretch. “What can I do for you that’s so important you’d sneak on-planet?” Estella’s posture is magnificent. Perfectly straight, yet somehow comfortable rather than stiff or awkward. I’ve seen her father in news holos and he looks like a king. She looks like an executive. Cold, ruthless, and confident. If I tried to stab her, I halfway believe that blade would snap. “You’re known for two things. One, you spaced a ship of traffickers. I don’t care about that except that it means you’re capable of being ruthless, when necessary, which is valuable. The other is that you’re hunting for the Abductor because he took and murdered your cousin. You’ve come the closest to finding him. With a reputation like yours—” She lets it drift off like my reputation is too unsavory to mention specifically, which, honestly, is a kindness I don’t expect. “You’ve nearly caught him twice.”

I wince. Now it just feels like she’s rubbing in my failure.

She continues, taking on a lecturing tone. “Once, on a frozen polar cap right after a girl was returned to her Family in Wilk territory. He dropped her at a way station, and you managed to identify his ship and track it to an ice moon nearby. The second time after you tracked him all the way to his flophouse. That adventure resulted in a shoot-out that left five constables dead and the Abductor in the wind.”

“That second time, he baited me into following him with a coded coms message and the threat to take another. He likes to play with me. You didn’t answer my question. I didn’t only ask why me. I asked why in secret.”

Something about this—no, nearly everything about this—reads off.

She pinches her mouth together and presses the side of a smooth metal band around her index finger before speaking. “I, Estella Escajeda am entering into contract with Cynbelline Khaw for the duration of her hunt for the Abyssal Abductor. Anything pertaining to myself or my Family that she may discover over the course of this investigation shall remain indefinitely private under penalty of banishment.”

Of course, she has a recorder in her jewelry. Vuur makes a leap from my shoulder to the glittering ring, jaws gaping and long black tongue extended, and I manage to catch it just a hair away. Its scaly little body wriggles in my hands as I yank it back to my shoulder with an apologetic wince. “No. Bad.” I turn my attention back to Estella. “You can’t banish me. I don’t live in your territory.”

“Perhaps I was unclear. Total banishment.” Her voice is frigid, and her hands are poised on her knees, knuckles so tight they’re nearly white.

This secret must be legendary. The kind that could ruin a Family. The kind that makes her desperate enough to come to me because, no matter the contract, if I want to hurt her with anything I learn, I can figure out how.

I lean back in my chair, elbows on the armrests and fingertips pressed together because if I don’t constrain them, they’ll probably be noticeably trembling with excitement. I can almost detect the Abductor’s scent in the air. “I accept your stipulations. This secret better be worth it.”

She presses her ring again. Back to off-the-record. “He has my daughter.”

I almost don’t understand the words. She’s so rigid for someone whose daughter is in mortal danger. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Families are monsters. Probably she’s as worried as if she misplaced a nice necklace. “You’ve kept a daughter hidden for years?”

“Twelve years, to be precise.” Estella says it carefully, as though speaking about her child is a foreign language with which she has only passing familiarity. “I had an affair with a fellow student while I was completing my education on Idyllwood. Someone impractical as a future partner. For the duration of my pregnancy, I arranged, with my nearest brother’s help, to study remotely while researching novel mining techniques on a border planet. While there, in the company of a tiny security contingency, I had Boreal. She was given to a trusted friend to raise.”

I blink, wondering if she’s saying what I think she’s saying.

“Have you visited her?” When I left home, I’d promised to never talk to my family again, with all the passionate drama of a new adult. I lasted about a month. It would take unimaginable strength to never speak to your daughter again.

“How is this relevant?”

Honestly, it isn’t. I’m just shocked that everything I’ve suspected about Family parenting is true, but I pull myself together and give her a reason. A good one. “It could be helpful to know how the Abductor knew she existed.”

“I see her several times a year when I visit my old friend. Boreal and her adoptive mother know that I am her birth mother, but no one else does.” Her hands still haven’t moved.

I grimace. “Someone does. Unless her abduction was a very unlikely coincidence.”

Finally, some movement. Estella reaches into a sharp-edged portfolio beside the chair and retrieves a plas-sheet. She hands it to me.

Familiar language slaps me in the face and I forget about Estella and her coldness. The Abyssal Abductor sends very specific ransom requests. He likes taunting his targets with their powerlessness. His message is scrawled on the sheet with heavy black font. It’s addressed directly to Estella Escajeda.

“You say you trust your brother, but he’s the most obvious culprit for selling this information. You’re the heir and she is yours, I assume. If he eliminates her, he’s closer to the top.” I hand the sheet back to her. I’ve seen enough of it.

“It isn’t my brother. Arcadio could have hurt her countless times over the years. He’s seen her more than anyone else.”

Arcadio. Shit. Right. I know her brother. In a way. He doesn’t know me. Not as Cyn Khaw, at least. He knows me as Generosity the cultist, poor misguided soul who ran back to her cult at the first opportunity and probably exploded along with the rest of them. I knew he was an Escajeda, of course, but I didn’t spend much time with the man. Although he looked a hell of a lot more alive than his older sister. He was made of flesh and bone instead of frigid ambition.

“My only advice to you is: pay the ransom. He returns his targets unharmed if you pay by the deadline and don’t bring in the authorities.”

“Your cousin was not returned.”

“We didn’t pay.” I don’t add that we never even found her body because he dumped her too deep in the ocean. “If you pay, you’re fine. If you don’t, he sinks his abducted target in an ocean and leaves them to die. Four adolescents have died that way. Four too many.” We found Aymbe’s clothes, washed ashore stained in blood, ripped from her body by time and predation. “Please. Pay the ransom.”

She folds her hands tighter in her lap. “I have given you my decision. If you track him down, a ransom won’t be necessary.”

Fuck, are Families cold. But someone’s got to take care of this poor kid. Clearly, to her mother and uncle, the Family’s reputation is more important than Boreal.

“So I’m a contingency plan, to track him down before the deadline?” Great, extra pressure. Not that it matters. I was always going to throw everything I have into tracking the Abductor. I always do. “Has the Abductor left any additional information?” I tap my fingers on the desk. Her sharp dark eyes watch every motion like I’m about to go for a weapon. Mostly I’m just keeping my fingers nimble in case Vuur takes a header toward her gleaming silver necklace. “I’ve tracked him before, or traced his steps after the fact, but it’s usually a new planet—although of some significance to the abductee. Without any new information, I’m stuck searching blind, and you know as well as I do, your Family is associated with more planets than nearly any other.”

She nods, face still businesslike. “I can give you the planet he was on one day ago. It meets his…” She swallows. A quick jerky motion of her throat. “His parameters. With one exception.”

His usual parameters are locations with deep oceanic abysses. I raise my eyebrows. “How did you manage that?”

“Boreal is Escajeda enough to have the most advanced tracers implanted. Tech that he very likely has not encountered before. The problem is that he has settled on Ginsidik. I know. He never returns to the same territory. This time, he did. You have familiarity with the planet, I understand?” If by “familiarity” she means that I lived there from birth into early adulthood, then yes, I’m familiar. It’s gorgeous. I fucking hate the place. “As you know, the ionosphere scrambles signals and, for certain tech, can cause it to glitch. Her tracer glitched after she hit the planet’s surface. He has no reason to know that I could trace him to Ginsidik, so he has no reason to leave. I’m sending you along with the only other person I trust.”

“Your brother. Who, conveniently, has dropped off the radar even more the past year.”

“Exactly. He has taken up with a scouting crew of a ship called the Calamity.” She says the word “scout” like it’s filthy. I wince internally. I wonder if they got a new ship. Their old one had a different name. I don’t remember what. Something dumb. The only good part about my time with the crew was the sparks that danced under my skin every time their medic looked my way. Micah Arora is the sort of person who sees far too much but keeps his own council. I never knew if my attraction to him was reciprocated.

Probably not. I wasn’t at my best out there.

I haven’t been at my best for quite some time, honestly. Micah was exactly the kind of patient and insightful that made me want to tell him more than I should. The type that made me believe he might even understand. I didn’t, though. Any more than I did with Madrigal.

Estella continues, “They have been afforded access to Ginsidik via negotiation with the Pierce Family and will be picking you up at the port this evening.”

I wonder what they had to give up for the docking rights. Pierce isn’t known for being generous. Not my problem, though. My problem is that not only do I have to return home again, but I also have to see the crew of the Calamity. I had subtle augmentations for the retrieval mission where I met them. I might not be bulky, but I look like what I am, a hunter. I’m long, lean, and prone to sharp edges. To embed with the cult, I needed to look like prey. I wore my hair longer, had temporary iris tattoos to lighten my eyes and injections to change my facial shape to round. I was also five kilos lighter than normal when I went there and eight kilos lighter than normal when I left because all there was to eat on the fucking planet was mind-altering plants and grainy meat. I look delicate rather than harsh when I’m thin. I’m used to carrying some muscle. Now, with more flesh on my bones, combined with the faded injections, I might be able to enter the ship as a stranger and skip all the dramatics.

People go by the big cues. Coloring and facial structure. Change that and even a scanner won’t recognize you.

I outline my standard fee for time, overhead, and danger, and she accepts the contract as if this is a routine furniture procurement, before efficiently forwarding the information that she’s collected and the docking time for my meeting with the Calamity. When she stands to leave, her face is set in stone. With a swirl of her wrist, the nullifying fabric wraps around her, and Estella Escajeda winks out of view.

Vuur whirrs a little sound of disappointment at the vanished jewelry. I whirr a little sound of relief that she’s gone. I consider sleep, decide I did it too recently to be able to drag myself back to the state, and instead spend the rest of the day researching the Calamity’s crew. I don’t learn much because I also researched the crew after Herschel Two.

I paid extra attention to one very specific member of the crew. The medic, Micah Arora. I didn’t find anything useful then, and I still don’t. Banished from Pierce territory when he was young for some unknown slight against his family. Then he disappeared. Then he was a medic with the Calamity.

The engineer, Caro Osondu, appeared out of nowhere a few years ago, which means that isn’t her real name. The biologist, Itzel with no second name, appeared out of nowhere about fifteen years ago. The only people with records are Temper and Arcadio, and those are so public that everyone in charted territory knows their history.

It’s deeply unsatisfying research.

 

Excerpted from Fiasco, copyright © 2024 by Constance Fay.