The Fractured Dark

Book 2: The Devoured Worlds

by Megan E. O'Keefe

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Women's Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Dying planets, dangerous conspiracies, and secret romance abound in the second book of the Devoured Worlds trilogy by rising space opera star Megan E. O'Keefe.

Naira and Tarquin have escaped vicious counter-revolutionaries, misprinted monsters and the pull of a dying planet. Now, bound together to find the truth behind the blight that has been killing habitable planets, they need to hunt out the Mercator family secrets.

But, when the head of Mercator disappears, taking the universe's remaining supply of starship fuel with him, chaos breaks loose between the ruling families. Naira's revolution must be put aside for the sake of humanity's immediate survival.

Praise for the series:

'Character-driven science fiction at its best - a taut novel with human questions at its heart'
E. J. Beaton, author of The Councillor

'Smart, incisive and utterly gripping. Megan E. O'Keefe's masterful storytelling will draw you into a complex, brutal, yet hope-charged world, break your heart, and leave you begging for more'
Rowenna Miller, author of Torn

'A delightfully twisty space opera filled with unique worldbuilding and deft explorations of humanity, family and power. Add in a dash of rebellion and a hint of romance, and I'm hooked - I can't wait for the next book!'
Jessie Mihalik, author of Hunt the Stars

'This is space opera for the ages, wrapped in complicated and delicious layers of family and loyalty and science and love and duty. I couldn't put it down!
Karen Osborne, author of Architects of Memory

Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 544

Sample

Naira had never infiltrated a spaceship while in her own body before, and she found the experience far too perilous for her liking. It was much less nerve-racking to drop her neural map into the print of someone who was supposed to be on the ship. She was used to blending. To subtle manipulations.

There was no subtlety in her boots ringing out against the engine bay’s wire-grid floor. No finesse in the explosive devices tucked into the bag slung across her back.

Trepidation crawled up her neck and prickled her scalp. The mining ship set to launch to Seventh Cradle next week was deathly silent. It should have been bustling with techs doing their final checks before the ship would shove off for one of the precious planets where the ecosystem had yet to succumb to planetary collapse syndrome. Instead, its lights were pushed down to power-saving mode and the hangar was empty of personnel.

Naira could hardly believe it when she’d first seen the empty hangars on Kav’s hacked security-camera feeds. She still couldn’t quite believe it.

The security system accepted Naira’s false credentials without so much as a hiccup. She paused in front of the warpcore containment, letting her gaze trail up the fine bones of emerald-green relkatite that caged the core, and wondered.

This was a rush job. Acaelus Mercator had raised the specter of the Conservators to the public eye as a threat to all mining missions. He’d claimed that the lack of relk on Sixth Cradle had been the fault of the Conservators. That they’d gotten there ahead of Mercator and brought the shroud to collapse the planet as they mined all the relk from the skin of that world and kept it for themselves.

And so the heads of MERIT had rallied. They’d joined their resources, frantically building two ships to launch to Seventh and Eighth Cradles to preserve those planets’ stores of relkatite against the Conservators, never understanding that their impulses were being manipulated. Never knowing that the fungus they used to mine that mineral, Mercatus canus, had bonded with the pathways in their bodies, using them to transform humanity into little more than an extended search network for more relkatite, which was canus’s preferred food.

Rushing the ships didn’t account for the sloppy seams in the walls, the pitting in the relkatite containment, or the rust staining the joints in the metal fittings. Naira gave the irritatingly handsome man next to her, Tarquin Mercator, a side-eyed glance.

“Does this feel off to you?” she asked.

The younger child of Acaelus crossed his arms, staring at the warpcore as if it were keeping secrets from him. Tarquin affected a slouch, reducing his towering height to something less imposing, but there was no slouching away the nose he’d intentionally inherited from his father, the green flecks in his hazel eyes, or the Mercator family crest printed around his wrists to curl in vine-like knotwork over the backs of his hands. He tugged on the sharp ridge of his chin, frowning.

Naira looked away from him as an unwelcome warmth stirred within her. She’d been told that on Sixth Cradle she’d cared for him, but she’d died before backing up those memories, and looking at him now… He was an empty ache in her chest, a man-sized hole in her past she didn’t know how to approach. Best to focus on his usefulness—rebellious Mercator, renowned geologist—than on how he made her feel.

Best to ignore the way his hair slipped over his temple, adding a pensive, deep shadow to the angle of his cheek.

“It does seem unusual,” he said, oblivious to her silent study of him. She’d found that he was oblivious to most things when lost in thought. “While my father’s motives are misguided, he wouldn’t let a ship of such import fall into disrepair. And the lack of security?” He gestured to the surrounding room. “It makes no sense.”

“It makes sense if it’s a trap,” she said.

His hand dropped to the pistol strapped to his side, slipping through the cover of his open dark brown jacket. Naira smiled to herself at the motion. Tarquin had been taught basic self-defense and weapons, but it was she who’d trained to be an exemplar—the bodyguards of all MERIT families. She found it cute, like a puppy carrying a too-large stick, that he thought he’d be useful if a fight broke out.

“If it’s a trap, it’s a poor one,” he said. “We haven’t seen a soul since we entered the hangar, and I can’t imagine Father would let us get this close to the warpcore if he meant to capture us before we could harm the ship.”

“Which means he’s got something else up his sleeve.”

Naira brought up her internal HUD and put a call through to Kav, who was, if things were going well, busy infiltrating the other mining ship in the hangar.

He picked up immediately. “You getting the feeling we’re at the wrong address?”

“I am.” She looped Tarquin and Kuma into the call. “Power-saving lighting, rust in the seams, and cracks in the wall paint. Not a soul to check things over or raise the alarm.”

“It’s quiet,” Kuma said, “too—”

“Don’t you dare finish that.” Naira was glad Kuma couldn’t see her smirk.

“Fine.” Kuma huffed dramatically. “I don’t like this. Feels like a setup.”

“If it is, it’s a fuckin’ weird one,” Kav said.

“We were just having the same conversation,” Naira said.

“I don’t understand his motivation,” Tarquin said, half to himself, as he examined the warpcore. Naira fell silent, and so did the others, letting him talk it out. “Canus is pushing him to secure the relkatite in the other two cradles. That makes sense. It wants to get ahead of us…” He avoided saying that it wanted to get ahead of his mother, too, as she was hell-bent on infecting the cradles with shroud lichen to keep canus from thriving on those worlds. “I understand that. I can even see a decoy ship—it gives us something else to attack as a distraction—but this… These are working ships. They have warpcores and relkatite containments and probably relkatite wiring, too. It’s a waste. Canus wouldn’t let him waste relkatite.”

“Maybe he’s not quite that controlled yet,” Naira said.

“Maybe,” Tarquin said without conviction.

“Regardless of the old man’s motives,” Kav said, “we’re here. We’ve got the bombs. Might as well take care of these so he doesn’t retrofit them later for future mining expeditions.”

“A woman in possession of a bomb is in want of a reason to use it,” Naira said.

“Oh, god help us, she’s been reading old shit again, hasn’t she?” Kuma said.

“Hanging up now,” Naira said. “Call me if anything blows up that’s not supposed to.”

She hung up before Kav could get out more than a mangled but. Naira sensed eyes on her, and half turned to arch a brow at Tarquin.

“What?”

“Pride and Prejudice?” He grinned sheepishly and brushed the hair off his forehead. “I knew you read nonfiction, but somehow fiction doesn’t fit in with all the… shooting. And bombing.”

She adjusted the strap across her chest and looked at the warpcore instead of him. “Exemplars end up with a lot of downtime between shifts. There’s only so much review of combat theory one person can take, and Mercator had a—well, you know—big digital library.”

“Yeah. That was at my grandparent Ettai’s insistence. They loved Austen.”

“Fascinating. Really not the time for book club.”

“You started it,” he said with a laugh that made the tension in her shoulders ratchet up.

“Are you stalling, Mercator?” she shot back, and regretted it as his laugh dwindled away. He’d been teasing her good-naturedly, but she’d gone for the throat because every time he did that, she wanted to tease back, and that led to flirting, and that wasn’t a door she was sure she should open. The crestfallen look he gave her stung but made it easier for her to breathe.

She really should have sent him with Kuma and brought Kav with her instead. Somehow she kept pulling him along beside her, and she couldn’t seem to stop.

“No, of course not,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

Naira swung the bag around so that it rested against her stomach, and tugged the zipper open, revealing six explosive devices about the length and width of her forearm. Tarquin had a matching set of bombs in his own bag. Twelve spines of relkatite made up the cage bars enclosing the warpcore. They needed to blow only one rib to break containment, but fail-safes were a must. And who could say no to more bombs? Naira pulled one out and flipped it over in her hand.

“The back has an adhesive strip that activates with pressure.” She approached the first rib. “You want to press it against the rib down low, as close to the ground as you can so that it’s out of sight.”

Naira crouched beside the warpcore, ignoring the tingle that rushed over her skin at close proximity to all cores. Sometimes, she thought she heard them whispering to her when she got this close. Not words, never anything like that, but murmurs. Sound waves of unknown origins reaching to her across impossible distances. It always made her shiver.

“Here.” She lined up the device but didn’t press it yet. “You do it.”

Tarquin hesitated, hands in his pockets. His reluctance had nothing to do with proximity to the warpcore, though he’d told her that he, like many others, experienced the same tingling sensation near cores. No, his hesitance was about the fact that they’d been dancing around each other for months, both of them avoiding being too physically close to each other.

“Are you certain you want me doing this?” He took a knee on the opposite side of the relkatite support, as distant from her as he could get and still reach the device.

“You’re going to have to do your six on your own. I’m not holding your hand forever, Mercator.”

He took the device from her cautiously, careful not to brush his hand against hers. It left him holding it awkwardly at the top, the balance off. She didn’t comment.

“Here?” He lined it up so that the bottom almost touched the floor. She nodded. He licked his lips, and she looked away. The device connected to the relkatite rib with a squishing noise as the adhesive activated. “I think that’s it.”

Naira turned in time to see him pull back. His hand was too high up, near the arming switch. He was about to brush it. Her pathways vibrated, granting her the speed she needed to grab his wrist, and she yanked him clear.

But she’d been having trouble adjusting to her print, and her arm was longer than expected. She over-pulled, and he slipped. Naira’s exemplar instincts took over. She dove for him and caught his head in her hand before it could hit the floor.

They froze, tangled, staring at each other. His pulse thundered through the wrist she held, his hair smooth between her fingers. Panic crawled across his face, pupils dilating. He tried to stuff the panic under a mask of indifference that didn’t quite fit.

“I…” He cleared a rough catch in his throat. “I’m guessing that was wrong?”

Naira chuckled shakily and let him go. He scrambled back a step and rubbed his wrist, looking anywhere but at her. The silken touch of his hair was a phantom against her skin.

“The position was right, but you almost bumped the arming switch.”

“I had no idea…” He trailed off and pointed his chin at the plastic casing over the red switch. “That?”

“Yes, that.” She rocked to her heels and watched him, crossing her arms over her knees. “Because you held the bomb in an awkward spot. Because you were trying to avoid touching me.”

He said nothing. Just kept rubbing his wrist where she’d grabbed him as if it hurt, when she knew damn well it didn’t.

“Mercator. Look at me.”

Tarquin flinched, then found the steel in his spine he could summon when hard-pressed. He forced himself to face her.

“We can’t keep—” She cut herself off and tried a different angle, making it about the work, not them. “This can’t affect our work.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Though I know being sorry is inadequate.”

“I’m not her.”

“I understand that. I mourn her, and it hurts, and I will make mistakes sometimes, but I ask for your patience.”

“You already have it.” She forced a smile to hide the spike of empathetic pain that pierced the hard shell of her exterior. That’s all it was. Empathy. Tarquin was a nice enough guy, and she could see how some other version of herself might have gotten close to him—though she was unclear on the details and wanted to keep it that way.

He was precisely her type, but in Naira’s experience, “her type” also included a slow revelation that the person in question was, in fact, a raging asshole under a kind facade. While she didn’t think Tarquin was likely to have a mean streak, well. He was a Mercator.

“Thank you.” Though sadness tinged his smile, it was genuine.

She stood and held a hand down to him. He eyed it like it was a naked blade. “Come on. Let’s set the other bombs and get out of here.”

He teetered on a precipice, watching that hand, and she waited while he worked out for himself if it was wise to accept such casual physical contact. She wasn’t so sure herself. Every time he was near, her stomach swooped. Every time he laughed, she caught herself smiling.

He sighed, slowly, and slapped his hand into hers. Naira yanked him to his feet and released him before stepping aside. The hand she’d touched flexed by his side, as if he were subconsciously trying to claw back the pressure of their skin together.

“So, I’m not supposed to touch the big red button?” he asked.

She turned her smile away from him. “That’s our last-ditch effort if we’re caught, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem here. Get them placed, then we’ll blow them from the shuttle at a safe distance.”

“I can do that.”

If he moved away from her too eagerly, she pretended not to notice. They finished up and soon were heading back to the shuttle.

“Have you had to use the triggers before?” Tarquin asked. “I mean, have you had to blow yourself up with the devices before you could get away?”

“Yes,” she said. Tarquin’s boot scuffed. “Not those devices specifically, but I’ve blown a ship with myself inside. Something went wrong on the mission to Fourth Cradle, on the Abacaxi. We had to detonate ahead of schedule. Kuma and Kav were out already, so Jonsun and I triggered the warpcore containment failure with us inside. They told us all about it when we reprinted.”

He glanced back at the hulking shape of the mining ship. “I knew those ships had blown up. I didn’t realize you were inside at the time.”

“Hazards of the job.” She shrugged. “I can’t count how many times I died in Acaelus’s defense, before. At least blowing up is instant.”

Tarquin fell silent, no doubt dwelling on how often she’d risked cracking her neural map to keep his father from the same risk. His sympathy chafed, but it was well-meaning enough, so she let him sit with the facts she’d already accepted.

Or told herself she’d accepted. She was still breaking into hangars and planting bombs on Acaelus’s property. Most of that was about stopping the spread of canus and the shroud. But a petty part of it was about revenge, too.

Maybe a larger part than she cared to admit.

“There’re our slowpokes,” Kuma called out from their ship’s open airlock. The ex-Ichikawa security captain filled the doorway, bracing herself against the frame to hover over them. She’d already stripped off her outer armor. Kuma didn’t like to keep the muscle of her arms hidden if she could help it, and her pathways gleamed gold against her skin. “Thought you got lost. Or stopped to espouse some ancient poetry.”

“Don’t give me a hard time for having more than rocks rattling around in my head.” Naira play-punched at Kuma’s stomach, making the stronger woman duck aside and mock-protect her middle.

Kuma pointed a short finger at Tarquin. “He’s the one with rocks for brains.”

“Rocks and minerals, I’ll have you know.” Tarquin put on an indignant air, but his faint smirk gave him away.

“Black skies, was that a joke? Hey, Kav, the Mercator’s got jokes!” Kuma cupped a hand around her mouth as she shouted into the cockpit.

“Somebody has to,” Kav called back, “because you sure as shit don’t.”

Naira ignored their good-natured bickering, instead focusing on stripping off her outer armor and stowing her equipment bag in the locker with her name scrawled across it in black marker. Tarquin slipped up alongside her to strip out of the light armor he’d worn beneath his jacket, the dusty scent of his sweat not unpleasant. Not for the first time, Naira silently cursed Kuma for sticking their lockers next to each other.

Kuma hauled the gangway up and shut the airlock, then gave the door a meaty thump with the side of her fist and called out the all clear. Naira made her way into the cockpit. She climbed into the copilot’s seat and accidentally kicked Kav as she tried to stretch her legs out around the console podium.

“Ugh.” Kav pulled his foot away.

“Sorry. Still a little clumsy in this body.”

“Yeah, I noticed, and Kuma said you dumped coffee all over the counter this morning. It’s been months, and that’s your preferred print. You should be settled in by now. Have you done the physical therapy?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Fine. Keep bumping into walls. Look, Nai—” Kav’s voice had started out soft, but he cut himself off as Tarquin’s footsteps approached. “What took you so long, anyway? Everything go to plan?” he said in his normal voice.

She gave him a sideways glance, but his attention was fixed on his console as he powered the engines back up.

“I conducted a quick training session on placement,” she said. “Everything was as quiet for us as it was for you.”

“Yeah right, you two were probably making out.”

Naira winced, half listening to Tarquin’s muttered excuses as he spun around and marched out of the cockpit twice as quickly as he’d walked in.

“Was that really necessary?” she asked, when his steps had receded.

“Sorry, dirty trick.” Kav switched the ship over to autopilot as it lifted off from the hangar floor and let itself out through the barrel-shaped airlock they’d come in through. “But the guy doesn’t take a hint easily, and I needed to talk to you without him hanging around.”

“He doesn’t hang around.” Her tone was more defensive than she would have liked. “What’s so secretive one of our active members can’t overhear it?”

“It’s about Jonsun.”

All her annoyance drained away in a flash. There weren’t a lot of ways to die for good, when you could upload your mind into a new print as long as you could afford to do so. People left the living world when their money ran out or when their neural maps cracked.

Jonsun, their old leader, had cracked.

Neural maps were never perfect. They degraded over time, artifacting whittling them away until one upload too many finally stressed the map to its breaking point. Most people couldn’t afford enough reprintings to reach that point. Violent deaths accelerated the process. The more traumatic the end, the more likely a map was to crack.

Double-printing was the worst way to go, and that was what had taken Jonsun.

A mind existed in superposition, and uploading it into a single print collapsed the waveform, anchoring it to one spot in time and space, and one spot alone. When a mind was uploaded into a second print, the outcome was catastrophic.

The mind didn’t know where it was supposed to exist. Some fell into an endless scream. Some got stuck in the repetitive cadence typical of the double-printed, as if they couldn’t be sure which mouth had said the word they meant to, so they said it again and again.

According to Tarquin, Naira had spoken with Jonsun in his cracked state while Jonsun was on the Einkorn in orbit over Sixth Cradle. She hadn’t fully believed that Jonsun had cracked—she hadn’t wanted to—until she’d watched a video sent back by the Einkorn, the security footage of her last moments on that ship.

“Well?” she asked.

“He sent something through so many relays it didn’t show up until this morning. It took me a while to realize what it was, but it’s… Look, it was on a deadman’s switch. I only saw the first couple of seconds because I had to check it out, but it’s for you. It’s private.”

“I see.”

“Yeah. I forwarded it to your files.”

“Thanks. Call me when we’re in detonation range?”

“You know I will.”

She felt strangely detached as she gave him a perfunctory pat on the shoulder and exited the cockpit. Kuma was regaling Tarquin with some story about one of her many fistfights. Tarquin shot Naira a help-me glance, but she waved him off, disappearing into the ship’s halls to seek her room.

Their ship had been listed as a shuttle before Tarquin stole it from Mercator Station, but a Mercator shuttle was a passenger ship for anyone else. It was roomy enough that they had private bedrooms with a few to spare. She had a narrow bed, a trunk for her belongings, a bathroom attached, and a desk. It was the second-largest space she’d ever called her own. Plenty of room to move around.

Plenty of room to pace a hole in the ground before she finally worked up the nerve to sit on the edge of her bed and press play.

Jonsun’s face floated up out of a holo projection from her forearm. Dark trenches had sunken beneath his eyes, and his golden hair was matted down on one side, but he smiled into the recording, a brief flash that lit up his face.

“Hey, Nai,” he said in that slow drawl she knew so well. The smile had gone. Sorrow suffused every pore. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. You’re not even…” He rubbed his temples. “This is the night before we cast to the Amaranth and the Einkorn. I used to… I make this video for you every time we do this, in case I’m the one who doesn’t come back. But now… Now you’re on ice, and I’m talking to a ghost, aren’t I?”

Naira couldn’t breathe. He brushed a tear off his cheek angrily, then stared down at the camera. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. If I don’t come back and by some miracle Kav gets you off ice after all, I need you to know that. I should have pulled the plug on the Cavendish. Things were strange from the jump about that mission, but we were hyped up on the success of the previous mission. Kav was sure he could get us in safely, and I guess he did. I guess Acaelus wanted us to get in, though, didn’t he?

“I don’t know if we should even try for the Amaranth and Einkorn without you. When I took over the Conservators, I’d never dreamed… never dared to hope we’d someday have someone like you. But I fucked it up, didn’t I? I insisted we cast to the Cavendish when you were wary, and I should have listened, and I think… I think I’m about to do it again.

“This mission, it doesn’t feel right. And I don’t know why I’m telling your ghost this—maybe because I can’t tell anyone else—but I won’t pull the plug. We’re going. We have to stop this, stop the shroud from spreading. I’d like to tell myself I’m doing this because it’s what you would have wanted, but I don’t know anymore. I wish I could ask you. Wish I could see you again.

“But if you’re watching this, then you’re back and I’m not. The others have probably defaulted to your leadership by now. Skies know Kuma and Kav don’t want to lead, and Jessel doesn’t have the fight in them. Not anymore. But I want you to know that it’s yours. I want the Conservators to be yours.

“We struggled for years to undermine MERIT before you came to us. We always talked about bigger hits, about doing more to stop MERIT from damaging the worlds, but I had so much doubt I didn’t dare express. So much fear that we weren’t doing the right thing. That we couldn’t be sure. Then you came along and gave us the strength with which to strike.”

Jonsun scratched at a pathway on his cheek. “But I doubt. I can’t help it. These hits we do, they’re leaving people on ice. We’re giving Mercator a monster to point at, to rally against. Maybe we’ve gone too far, you know?” He laughed roughly. “Stupid, right? But sometimes I think… Well. Sometimes the doubts are stronger. But in the end, it’s hatred for the shroud that pulls me through. The shroud has to be stopped.

“You don’t doubt, do you, Nai? You showed up on our doorstep with a fire in your heart in need of something to consume, and you never stopped burning. I… admired you for that. So, if you’re listening to this, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for getting you caught on the Cavendish. I’m sorry for whatever damn fool thing I did that got me dead for good, and I’m sorry the movement is yours to carry now, because I know how heavy it weighs.

“I don’t want to give you advice. You’re more than capable. But, Nai, if you, of all people, if you ever start to doubt. You dig. You lean into that feeling and you excavate it until you understand it. Because I think… I think something’s very wrong, and I can’t quite see what it is. Maybe you can. I believe you can.

“Goodbye, Naira Sharp. Carry your fire a little longer, eh? For me?”

He smiled sadly and ended the video.

Naira stared at the space above her arm where his face had hovered, numb with shock. He’d known. He hadn’t figured out the truth, that was buried too deep, but he’d noticed the incongruence within himself. Had realized that some motivations didn’t quite line up with what they should be.

Jonsun had been onto canus. But in the end, canus wanted the shroud destroyed, and that’s what had mattered to Jonsun above all else.

A light knock startled her. The door slipped open. Tarquin stood there, his genial smile frozen into something unnatural as he read the horror on her face.

“Are you all right?” He stepped toward her. Stopped himself.

“What do you want?” she snapped.

“Uh…” He pushed hair behind his ear. “The ships have blown up.”

“What?” She burst to her feet. “I told Kav to call me when we were in range.”

“Whatever blew up those ships, it wasn’t us. It’s all over the news and you’d… you’d better come see.”

Tarquin scrambled to avoid being knocked aside as Naira stormed out of her room. The ships blowing up early should have held his full attention, but he couldn’t put the haunted look he’d seen on her face out of his mind. He forced himself not to press her further. She didn’t want to share her private hurts with him. He knew that.

“Tell me we’re out of the blast radius,” she said as she ran into the cockpit.

“We’re clear,” Kav shouted over his shoulder.

Kav had a news feed pulled up on the largest console. Footage of the explosion was being played from multiple angles while a reporter explained that the cause was still being investigated. Naira skidded to a stop behind the copilot’s podium and braced herself against it, staring down that footage like she could wind it back, make it untrue.

The explosion had been larger than they’d planned. It’d taken out not just the ships and the hangar, but the construction infrastructure in orbit around the hangar. Places where people lived.

Had lived.

“What the fuck?” she asked no one in particular.

Kav had started shaking his head the moment the news came through and he hadn’t stopped. He dug through window after window in search of information that, more than likely, didn’t exist.

“We ran those numbers a hundred times.” Frustration made Kav’s voice taut. “Our charges were only large enough to break the containment. By law, the construction platforms should have been outside the damage zone for a warpcore breach.”

“It wasn’t us,” Kuma said. “No way was that us.”

Naira muttered curses under her breath and started pulling up windows from the console in front of her. “Mercator, get me numbers on the lives on those platforms. I want to know the biological damage, see if we can get phoenix fees to those families quietly.”

“Right away.”

Through the haze of green holos all around them, the news footage shifted to the interior of the hangar before the explosion. In that footage, Naira walked across the room, her empty bag slung over her back. It irked Tarquin that he’d been edited out. She walked alone.

Though they’d been talking amicably, her expression in the footage was hard. Frightening in its coldness, really. Tarquin had only seen that look a few times, and almost always, it was right before she was about to pull a trigger. Mercator techs must have altered her face to frighten the public.

“Turn that up,” Naira said.

Kav shoved his programs aside, then expanded the news report and cranked up the volume.

“… The Conservator was believed to have had her map locked after being apprehended during the bombing of the Cavendish, but footage leaked to us captured her making her escape in the moments before the hangar’s destruction,” the news anchor said.

“It’s possible,” the anchor’s cohost said, “that another Conservator is wearing Ex. Sharp’s print to add to the confusion and terror.”

“Always a possibility,” the first anchor said with a scowl that indicated she was annoyed her colleague had undermined her attempt to frighten people by reporting on the escape of a ter